Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term “imperial romance” encapsulates a complex group of fictions appearing in Britain between the 1880s and the 1920s, which were devoted to narrating adventure in colonial settings. The phrase arises from the influence of postcolonial literary criticism, initiated by Edward Said in the 1970s, where literature emerges as an important textual source for understanding the construction of imperialist ideologies and the relationship of the “imperial subject” to the colonized “other” (see Said 1978; 1993 ). However, the two components of the phrase, “imperial” and “romance,” need to be understood in their individual contexts. While the adjective “imperial” conveniently describes the generic mode of this kind of fiction, we need nevertheless to be alert to the historical complexities that lie behind the word itself, and the dangers of too readily schematizing such a varied and ambivalent range of texts. In a historical sense, the term “imperialism” is both fluid and problematic, as etymological shifts in the meanings and associations of the word occurred throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the word “imperialism” began to be used by contemporaries to describe British overseas expansion only in the last decades of the century. This usage coincided with specific shifts in economic, political, and philosophical thinking about empire in the late nineteenth century, when conflicting ... log in or subscribe to read full text