Harrington-Austin, Eleanor J.

Shelley and the Development of English Imperialism: British India and England

1999 0-7734-7932-5
This postcolonialist work locates Shelley in the context of England’s colonial venture in British India. It also ties together several major, seemingly disparate – and even competing - late-18th/early 19th-century discourses on British India, and illustrates how those discourses were later enlisted to serve the Imperialism of the English Raj. Shelley’s A Philosophical View of Reform, the guiding document of this study, demonstrates his knowledge of these debates and his own internalized contradictions concerning both English workers at home and Indian subjects abroad. Chapters include surveys of period issues of class, gender, race, and nationalism, their relationship to British India, and Shelley’s personal and literary treatment of them; English Orientalism concerning India and Indic elements in Shelley’s poetry; Utilitarian projects in India and England and Shelley’s reaction; Evangelical projects in India and England; Victorian imperialism.