IntroductionPART I. DAWN
1. From Dawn Island to Heart of Darkness
2. Bringing Up the Empire: Captain Marryats MidshipmenPART II.
NOON
3. Thackeray's India
4. Black Swans; or, Botany Bay Eclogues
5. The New Crusades
6. The Genealogy of the Myth of the "Dark Continent"
7. The Well at Cawnpore: Literary Representations of the Indian
Mutiny of 1857PART III. DUSK
8. Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure
Novel, 1880–1914
9. Epilogue: Kurtz's "Darkness" and Conrad’s Heart of
DarknessNotes
Index
Patrick Brantlinger is James Rudy and College Alumni Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of English and Victorian Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of many books, including Dark Vanishings, Fictions of State, and Bread and Circuses, also from Cornell.
Rule of Darkness is a significant contribution to studies seeking
to reveal how the English in the nineteenth century created
demeaning and often destructive images of Mrica and the East,
images that continue to haunt twentieth-century writing, films, and
attitudes.
*Conradiana*
An outstanding analysis of imperialism in 19th-century British
literature.... Brantlinger deploys a real wealth of material,
providing fresh insights at every turn.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
The path-breaking work Brantlinger has done opens up the terrain of
Victorian culture in refreshing and remarkable ways. His analysis
of the imperialist impulse in many heretofore isolated phases of
Victorian culture is both inspiring and dependable, a rare
combination. Rule of Darkness will undoubtedly be complemented and
extended by the work of others in the near future, but it is hard
to see how it could be surpassed.
*Novel*
This learned and incisive study shows how deeply imperialist
assumptions pervade Victorian narratives from the adventure yarn
through the realist novel and the 'Imperial Gothic' of fantasy
fiction. Brantlinger both colonizes a range of noncanonical texts
and explores the imperialist darkness at the heart of such standard
authors as Macaulay and Thackeray, Kipling and Conrad.... His
mapping of overgrown paths between Victorian liberalism and
imperialism, abolitionism and racism, are invaluable guides to the
imaginative politics of the last century.
*Virginia Quarterly Review*
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