Confessions of a Thug

Philip Meadows Taylor author Kim A Wagner editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:11th Jul '24

£10.99

This title is due to be published on 11th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Confessions of a Thug cover

'You have given a faithful portrait of a Thug's life, his ceremonies, and his acts' Often overshadowed by Kipling's Kim or Forster's A Passage to India, Philip Meadows Taylor's forgotten classic, Confessions of a Thug (1839), is nevertheless the most influential novel of early nineteenth-century British India. This was the first dramatic account to expose a European readership to the fantastic world of the murderous Thugs, or highway robbers, who strangled their victims and who have ever since been a stable of Western popular culture. Writing in the voice of a captured Thug, Taylor presents an Orientalist fantasy that is part picaresque adventure and part colonial exposé. Confessions of a Thug offers a unique glimpse of the colonial world in the making, revealing how the British imagined themselves to be omniscient and in complete control of their Indian subjects. This unique critical edition makes available a fascinating and significant work of Empire writing, in addition to excerpts from the original colonial texts that inspired Taylor's narrative.

ISBN: 9780198854647

Dimensions: 196mm x 130mm x 27mm

Weight: 418g

608 pages