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- Title
Rider Haggard: A Triptych of Ambiguities on British Imperialism.
- Authors
Generani, Gustavo
- Abstract
Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She were very popular fictions in their time and, as such, were powerful channels for the dissemination of certain ideological tenets. They were written in a short historical period from the Berlin Conference - which organised the European exploitation of Africa (1884-85) - to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee (1887) - that boosted British imperial pride. Some similarities enable us to analyse these Imperial Gothic romances as a unity, bound by a shared ideology. However, this ideology should be read as a unity of tensions. Haggard's fictional works interweave a network of moral, political, racial, and gender issues that, consciously or unconsciously, both support and undermine the British Empire. They are at the heart of an imperial culture that is dialectically destroying itself from within at the peak of its grandeur. Their critical distance from the Other colonised and the coloniser's self-image reveals them as British constructions with paradoxical, self-deconstructive effects. Thus, in the act of creation of the colonised, the colonising culture unveils its terror to itself. This paper is an analysis of these ideological ambiguities from gothic and psychological perspectives.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; KING Solomon's Mines (Book : Haggard); ALLAN Quatermain (Book); SHE (Book : Haggard); HAGGARD, H. Rider (Henry Rider), 1856-1925; IMPERIALISM
- Publication
Victoriographies, 2015, Vol 5, Issue 1, p54
- ISSN
2044-2416
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3366/vic.2015.0183