Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947

Good condition with sunned spine and cover, minor shelfwear. Page edges slightly marked in places. Unmarked copy with tight binding.

Literature/Colonial Studies/Gender Studies
"Paxton has written a book whose rich hybridity and interdisciplinary crossingsecho and extend the goals of postcolonial theory."
-JOSEPH ALLEN BOONE, University of Southern CaliforniaWriting under the Raj is the first study to challenge the long-held critical
assumption that the rape of colonizing women by colonized men was the first,or the only, rape script in British colonial literature. Nancy Paxton asks why
rape disappears in British literature about English domestic life in the 1790sand charts its reappearance in British literature about India written between
1830 and 1947. She then documents the reemergence of representations of rapein literature about English life in the 1890s and shows how rape themes were
suppressed by the emergence of British modernism. In her examination ofnovels such as Kipling's Kim and Forster's A Passage to India, Paxton reveals
the dynamic relationship between metropolitan British literature and novelswritten by men and women who lived in the colonial contact zone of British
India throughout this period. Surveying more than thirty canonized and popularAnglo-Indian novels, Paxton shows how the treatment of rape reflects basic
conflicts in the social and sexual contracts defining British and Indian women'srelationships to the nation-state. Writing under the Raj vividly demonstrates
how all these novels reflect unresolved ideological and symbolic conflicts inBritish ideas about sex, violence, and power.
Nancy L. Paxton is an associate professor of English at Northern ArizonaUniversity and author of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism,
Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender.Cover illustration: "Massacre of English Officers and Their Wives at Jhansi," from Charles Ball,
History of the Indian Mutiny (1858).