Colonial Voices

Ever since the nineteenth-century the imperial romance has been understood, on some level, not merely as a self-evident genre of adventure capable of producing an aesthetic experience but as a political construction of ideological identifications and exclusions. There is a serious dearth of critical work on late-imperial writers of popular romances written about the Anglo-African colonies and the regions beyond their imperial frontiers. A growing interest in Africa now means that even the Anglo-imperialist using the voices of the original inhabitants to write about Africa is no longer a forgettable novelist from an insignificant corner of the globe. The strategic move in Colonial Voices is to re-evaluate "voice" in terms of "landscape," in which natural space and cultural space are interdefining, though radically different for indigenous and capitalistic societies. Thus when economic globalization invaded diverse indigenous habitats, it redefined the land as a capitalistic resource. Tribes were progressively displaced from their traditional physical homelands which served as the framework for their cultural voices-for myths, songs, ceremonies, visions. A magnificent scholarly study

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Gerald Monsman is Professor and former Head of the Department, where he specializes in nineteenth-century British and Anglo-African literature. Previously as Professor at Duke University he had been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and, while part of the Duke program in creative writing, twice won the Blackwood Prize for Fiction from Blackwood's Magazine (Edinburgh). To date he has published eight volumes of literary criticism, fifteen scholarly editions, one historical monograph, one critical biography, seven book chapters, and more than thirty critical articles, along with reference criticism, poetry and fiction, and reviews. His career has been heavily invested in recovering "lost" or neglected writers of major importance with book-length critical studies: Walter Pater, Charles Lamb, Olive Schreiner, H. Rider Haggard, Bertram Mitford, Ernest Glanville, and John Trevena (regarded as one of the finest novelists of his time who today has fallen into total neglect).