English Writing and India, 1600û1920: Colonizing Aesthetics

This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India. Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric a? from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the a?shikara? memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centurya?s extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of newlands and cultures.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad, India.

Acknowledgements Introduction: Aesthetic Negotiations Chapter 1: Marvelous Difficulty, 1600-1720 Chapter 2: The Social Monstrous, 1600-1720 Chapter 3: The Imperial Sublime, 1750-1820 Chapter 4: The Missionary Picturesque, 1790-1860 Chapter 5: The Sporting Luxuriant, 1850-1920 Notes Bibliography Index