The Rhetoric of English India

by Sara Suleri Goodyear

Tracing a genealogy of colonial discourse, Suleri focuses on paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by the British colonization of the Indian  subcontinent. Both the literature of imperialism and its postcolonial aftermath emerge here as a series of guilty transactions between two cultures that are equally evasive and uncertain of their own authority.

"A dense, witty, and richly allusive book . . . an extremely valuable contribution to postcolonial cultural studies as well as to the whole area of literary criticism."―Jean Sudrann, Choice

Genres: India, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[G · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful account not of "Otherness" in the colonial encounter, but of the ambivalences and "guilty transactions" between colonizer and colonized in India, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The chapter on Kipling's Kim is brilliant.