Lexington Books
Pages: 240
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¾
978-1-4985-6290-4 • Hardback • August 2020 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-4985-6291-1 • eBook • August 2020 • $90.00 • (£69.00)
Matthew Carey Salyer is associate professor of English at the United States Military Academy, West Point.
Introduction: When We “empired in the empire”: The Problem of Narrating Imperial Time and Place in an Imperial Time and Place
Chapter One: “A little false geography”: Edmund Burke as Edward Waverley
Chapter Two: “The empire of the father continues even after his death”: Edgar Huntly, James Annesley, and the Eighteenth-Century Orphan Redemptioner Narrative
Chapter Three: Still “under Sir William”: Locum Tenens, Cooper’s Leatherstocking, and the Tragic View of the American Revolution
Chapter Four: “Revolution is a work of blood”: Nationalism, Horror, and Mercantile Empire in Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship
Chapter Five: “Buried in their strange decay”: Lost Letters, Lost Races, and Imperial (Mis)translations
Chapter Six: “Just as Government’s a mere matter of form”: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Imperial Romanticism, and the Art of “Personation”
Chapter Seven: Coda: “And to show us your books”: Kipling’s Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan as “Romance-Monger” and Reader
Brokering Culture is a provocative reimagining of eighteenth-century political and economic forces as they intersect with contradictory human factors in the haphazard and tragic founding of the [First] British Empire and the myths that cloak it. Salyer gives us a peek behind the curtain of romance and nationalism, where a cast of criminals, conmen, adventures, and outcasts are transformed into the heroes and villains of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Rudyard Kipling.
— D. Michael Jones, East Tennessee State University
From Horace Walpole's broken windows at Strawberry Hill to far-flung reaches of the British empire, Matthew Salyer in Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel covers a vast expanse of historical and literary territory. As questions of "British" identity became complicated by the rapid expansion of empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, fiction became a space in which some of the tensions could be explored. In illuminating these tensions, Salyer impresses with his broad range and thoughtful selections, touring us through a fascinating array of literary texts and primary source material. Colorful anecdotes and personalities abound. Salyer's treatment of 18th- and 19th-century legal issues in a literary context makes a particularly distinctive contribution. This is an intelligent and captivating study.
— Steven P. Harthorn, University of Northwestern, St. Paul