Melodrama is often seen as a blunt aesthetic tool tainted by its reliance on improbable situations, moral binaries, and overwhelming emotion, features that made it a likely ingredient of British imperial propaganda during the late nineteenth century. Yet, through its impact on many late-Victorian genres outside of the theater, melodrama developed a complicated relationship with British imperial discourse.
Melodramatic Imperial Writing positions melodrama as a vital aspect of works that underscored the contradictions and injustices of British imperialism. Beyond proving useful for authors constructing imperialist fantasies or supporting unjust policies, the melodramatic mode enabled writers to upset narratives of British imperial destiny and racial superiority.
Neil Hultgren explores a range of texts, from Dickens’s writing about the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion to W. E. Henley’s imperialist poetry and Olive Schreiner’s experimental fiction, in order to trace a new and complex history of British imperialism and the melodramatic mode in late-Victorian writing.
Table of Content
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One: Melodrama as Plot
- One: Imperial Melodrama after the Sepoy Rebellion
- Two: Romance; or, Melodrama and the Adventure of History
- Part Two: Melodrama as Aestheticized Feeling
- Three: Imperialist Poetry, Aestheticism, and Melodrama’s Man of Action
- Four: Stevenson’s Melodramatic Anthropology
- Part Three: Melodrama as Distant Homeland
- Five: Olive Schreiner and the Melodrama of the Karoo
- Conclusion: Pirates and Spies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Neil Hultgren is an associate professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches courses in British literature and Victorian studies. He has written on Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard, and Oscar Wilde, and his articles have appeared in such venues as Literature Compass and Victorians Institute Journal.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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