Full Description
This is the first book-length study of imperial crossings in Thomas Hardy's novels and short stories. Combining the strengths of world-literary and world-systems analyses with a cultural materialist approach, the study offers unparalleled coverage of global links in Hardy's fiction, engaging, in addition, with a range of dissenting responses - at both formal and thematic registers - to the British world-system's exploitative structures. Hardy's prose outputs reveal that the empire, contrary to popular critical assumptions in postcolonial studies, did not harmonise the classes, genders or regions into a shared national imperial identity, culture or destiny. A major component of the study additionally includes comparative readings of the 'modern' world-system and imperial sociality in writings by Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, David Livingstone, and in Chartist poetry. The book will be an invaluable resource to teachers, students and enthusiasts working in the field of world literature, and in Victorian, postcolonial and settler colonial studies.
Contents
1 Imperial Dissent in Thomas Hardy's Fiction: Class, Gender, Race.- Part I: The Middle Classes and the Imperial World-System.- 2 Commodity Frontiers and the Alienation of Labour in Hardy's Indian Periphery.- Part II: The Upper Classes and the Imperial World-System.- 3 Imperial Adventure and Female Oppression in Hardy's Elite Frontiers.- 4 Uneven Perceptions and Representations of 'Fashionable' Frontiers: Space and Race.- Part III: Labour and the Settler Regions of the Imperial World-System.- 5 Transportation and Emigration in the Fiction of the 1880s.- 6 'Failed' Emigration in the Closing Works of the 1890s.- 7 Conclusion.
