Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918

by Elleke Boehmer (Editor)

Empire Writing is the first anthology to gather together British imperial writing alongside native and settler literature, interweaving short stories, poems, essays, travel writing, and memoirs from the phase of British expansionist imperialism known as high empire. This wide-ranging selection
reveals the diversity of responses to colonial experience, and encompasses some of the empire's key symbols and emblematic moments. Comprehensive notes and full biographies ensure that this is one of the most compelling, readable and academically valuable source books on the period.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Anthologies, Classics, Literature

576 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 1998

Reviews

[Jacky Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read only a selection (Joseph Conrad's 'An Outpost of Progress' and Toru Dutt's selected poems), but I applaud Elleke Boehmer for this enterprising work. Would've worked better for me if the texts were organised thematically rather than temporally, but Boehmer's introduction mediates that by demarcating the thematic grounds of the anthology. It is, I think, of utmost importance to remember that Empire was a tangled web of interconnections, engagements, and dialogues: even during the period of 'high Empire', the metropolitan centre was very much influenced by its peripheries. Literature is crucial to Empire studies because as imaginative, fertile, affective spaces, it opens a window to the crucial tensions, doubts, uncertainties, and shadows that were very much central to the imperial project. Thus Empire was never just geographic or physical; in the form of ideologies, bodies, commodities, and objects, it circulated around the globe and in and out of the metropolitan centre. And what is the purpose of tracing these physical and metaphysical paths imperialism has embarked? Well, perhaps it could serve to redress imperialism's perpetuation. Edward Said would say it is to achieve counterpoint, acknowledging that imperialism has had a role in shaping culture and carefully realising such influence. To me, literary studies of Empire does what Matthew Arnold thinks is criticism's most important role: making readers see the world in a different light. Empire was and is everywhere, shadowing, doubling, moulding, revolting against the literature of its time: criticism gives us this troubling, turbulent, yet accurate, picture.

[Lieke✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read parts of it for my class on Post colonial studies: key texts and contexts

exercise In the chapter you read for today, Elleke Boehmer writes that the British Empire was constructed and understood "by way of text" (14). With that in mind, please comment on how Anthony Trollope's account of his travels in Australia, and his encounter with Aboriginal people, might have contributed to the British empire-building project. Please quote from Trollope's text in your answer.

“Of course it was their natural temper. The land was theirs…. The whit man was catching all their fish, driving away their kangaroos, taking up their land, domineering over them… the white man, of course, felt that he was introducing civilization: but the black man did not want civilization. He wanted fish, kangaroos and liberty.”
In this section you get the feeling that Trollope is defending the Aboriginals, but when you read further;
“They were and are savages of the lowest kind. With reference to their cannibal propensities i heard many varying stories …”
He is quoting a lot of earlier travellers to Australia, who wrote down their experiences and colonial thoughts. This is what Boehmer talks about, literature, broadly defined, underpinned efforts to interpret other lands and offering home audiences a way of thinking about the new colonial acquisitions. These first explorers wrote memoirs and fed the anticipation of future explorers, scientists ect.

“This his painting, added very much to his natural deformity; for they all of them have the most unpleasant looks and wordt features of any people I ever saw”
Colonialist attitudes were formed in response to the culture and also the struggles of the colonized. there is on one side a fascination with the difference to European customs, but also finding this weird and ‘savage’, just because these people have other customs and looking different.