ABSTRACT

Several essays point to the origins in Romantic-era fiction of the critique of imperialism that has seemingly peaked in recent years. When scholars discuss the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British novel today, few dispute that something dramatic happened to the novel as a genre at about the time of the French Revolution. If Kipling offers a notorious example of British imperialist contempt for indigenous peoples and cultures, Elizabeth Hamilton and Frances Trollope, nearly a century earlier, present a more mixed and culturally alert picture. As happens in Hamilton's account of Anglo-Indian cultural exchange, in Trollope's novel the British cultural tradition "civilizes" the indigenous citizen and culture by subsuming them within the familiar conventions of the real or ostensibly dominant culture. Peter Walmsley argues that the English Gothic arises from the eighteenth-century tradition of sobriety that the nationalistic British believed distinguished them from their French contemporaries.