Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

<p>This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. </p><p>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.</p><p>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 – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the ‘shikar’ memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s extreme exotic. <em>English Writing and India</em> provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.</p>