Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel

Matthew C. Salyer

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel examines the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American “romancers” and the conceptual frameworks that eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors used to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain’s diffused, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer argues that this cultural experience, more than what Lukács had in mind when he wrote of a mass historical consciousness after Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown and Frederick Marryat. This book traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century “romance” hero through a number of proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, including Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley, among others. The author argues that popular Romantic novels such as Scott’s Waverley and Cooper’s The Pioneers convert the problem of narrating the political geographies of eighteenth-century Empire into a discourse of history, placing the historical realities of negotiating Imperial authority at the heart of a nineteenth-century project that fictionalized the possibilities and limits of political historical agency in the modern nation state.

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 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Politics

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel examines the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American “romancers” and the conceptual frameworks that eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors used to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain’s diffused, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer argues that this cultural experience, more than what Lukács had in mind when he wrote of a mass historical consciousness after Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown and Frederick Marryat. This book traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century “romance” hero through a number of proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, including Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley, among others. The author argues that popular Romantic novels such as Scott’s Waverley and Cooper’s The Pioneers convert the problem of narrating the political geographies of eighteenth-century Empire into a discourse of history, placing the historical realities of negotiating Imperial authority at the heart of a nineteenth-century project that fictionalized the possibilities and limits of political historical agency in the modern nation state.

Details

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 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / Subjects & Themes / Politics

Author

Matthew Carey Salyer is associate professor of English at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

In this intricate exploration of literature and history, Salyer (United States Military Academy, West Point) illuminates the way politics and imperialism infect 18th- and 19th-century texts. Whereas literature is often analyzed in terms of postcolonial history, Salyer suggests that history and historical accounts of imperial adventures correspond to and create literary forms in novels at the same time that novels invoke the imperial enterprise. . . Readers will appreciate how Salyer weaves the somewhat haphazard British consciousness of imperial changes with historical fiction and tales of empire to examine American and British writers and writing, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Brockden Brown, Blackwood’s Magazine, and Rudyard Kipling. Detailed and complex in argument, this critical text demands a careful academic reader. Those interested in how historical texts come to be mined for the historical-romance content of 19th-century novels will especially appreciate the work on Kipling’s late empire perspective as a counterpoint to Frederick Marryat’s lived naval experience, captured in works like the The Phantom Ship (1839). Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

— CHOICE

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

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel

Matthew C. Salyer

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel

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