ABSTRACT
It is tempting to view the publication of Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes as equivalent to those moments in Victorian explorer narratives when the object of the quest presents itself in an apparent plenitude to the gaze of the narrator. A vantage point is reached and the river/ mountain/plain can at last be seen as a single object. Pratt’s project has been developed through a number of essays and articles published over the past decade, but here they have finally been laid out as a single study of colonial travel writing from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present.
