Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel

The book Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel explores the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American "romancers" and the conceptual frameworks used by eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain's diffuse, tenuous, and often accidental authority. It argues that this cultural experience gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, and Frederick Marryat. It also traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century "romance" hero through proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, such as Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the court case of James Annesley.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 298 pages
Publication date: 15 May 2022
Publisher: Lexington Books

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel delves into the intricate interplay between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American "romancers" and the conceptual frameworks employed by eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors to envision and critique their own experiences of Britain's diffuse, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer contends that this cultural encounter, surpassing Lukács' notion of a mass historical consciousness following Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach adopted by writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, and Frederick Marryat. This book explores the transformative journey of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker, evolving into the nineteenth-century "romance" hero through a series of proto-novelistic responses to the challenge of Imperial history. Noteworthy examples include Edmund Burke's insights in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley. The author argues that popular Romantic novels like Scott's Waverley and Cooper's The Pioneers transform the problem of narrating the political geographies of eighteenth-century Empire into a discourse of history, centering the historical realities of negotiating Imperial authority at the core of a nineteenth-century project that fictionalized the possibilities and limitations of political historical agency within the modern nation-state.

Weight: 367g
Dimension: 220 x 152 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781498562928