Andrew Rudd, Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. x + 216. £50 hardback. 9780230233393.

Moments of royal succession, which punctuated the Stuart era (1603–1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields.

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Juvenile Fiction

10.1093/oso/9780199609932.003.0017 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Mavis Reimer ◽

Clare Bradford ◽

Heather Snell

Keyword(s):

Indigenous Knowledge ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

British Literature ◽

Ways Of Knowing ◽

Indigenous Ways Of Knowing ◽

Juvenile Fiction

This chapter focuses on the juvenile fiction of the British settler colonies to 1950, and considers how writers both take up forms familiar to them from British literature and revise these forms in the attempt to account for the specific geography, politics, and cultures of their places. It is during this time that the heroics associated with building the empire had taken hold of British cultural and literary imaginations. Repeatedly, the juvenile fiction of settler colonies returns to the question of the relations between settlers and Indigenous inhabitants—sometimes respecting the power of Indigenous knowledge and traditions; often expressing the conviction of natural British superiority to Indigenous ways of knowing and living; always revealing, whether overtly or covertly, the haunting of the stories of settler cultures by the displacement of Indigenous peoples on whose land those cultures are founded.

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