Melodramatic Imperial Writing : From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (266 pages)
- Series in Victorian Studies .
- Series in Victorian Studies .
Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction "At Last!" and "Too Late!" -- Part One Melodrama as Plot -- One Imperial Melodrama after the Sepoy Rebellion -- Two Romance -- or, Melodrama and the Adventure of History -- Part Two Melodrama as Aestheticized Feeling -- Three Imperialist Poetry, Aestheticism, and Melodrama's Man of Action -- Four Stevenson's Melodramatic Anthropology -- Part Three Melodrama as Distant Homeland -- Five Olive Schreiner and the Melodrama of the Karoo -- Conclusion Pirates and Spies -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Melodrama is often seen as a blunt aesthetic tool tainted by its reliance on improbable situations, moral binaries, and overwhelming emotion, features that made it a likely ingredient of British imperial propaganda during the late nineteenth century.
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English prose literature-History and criticism. Melodrama, English-History and criticism. Literature and society-England-History. Imperialism in literature.