Taming cannibals : race and the Victorians / Patrick Brantlinger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brantlinger, Patrick, 1941-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Cannibalism in literature.

Race in literature.

Racism in literature.

Cannibalism--History--19th century.

Cannibalism.

Race relations--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Race relations.

History.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

x, 277 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2011.

Summary:

Brantlinger (English, Indiana U.) examines contradictions in the racist and imperialist ideology of Victorians who saw civilization as an unattainable goal for nonwhite people, yet viewed civilizing other races as the justification for imperialism. He investigates racist stereotypes in Victorian literature and culture and how these conceptions helped Victorians categorize humans. He examines ideas of cannibalism, missionaries and humanitarians, savage and barbarian behaviors and cultures, perceptions of the Irish, and how race affected social and political controversies, including Benjamin Disraeli's racist interpretations of history and politics, and the rise of science fiction and the Victorian response to evolution and machines, with discussion of texts such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Thomas Williams's Fiji and the Fijians, James Bonwick's Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Matthew Arnold's "On the Study of Celtic Literature," H. Rider Haggard's She, Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden," Bram Stoker's Dracula, and H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Contents:

Missionaries and cannibals in nineteenth-century Fiji

King Billy's bones : the last Tasmanians

Going native in nineteenth-century history and literature

"God works by races" : Benjamin Disraeli's Caucasian Arabian Hebrew tent

Race and class in the 1860s

The unbearable lightness of being Irish

Mummy love : H. Rider Haggard and racial archaeology

Shadows of the coming race

Epilogue : Kipling's The white man's burden and its afterlives.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780801450198

0801450195

OCLC:

706965785