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A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.
Price: $32.00
Pages: 240
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date:
16 December 2014
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231171694
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
The great merit of Viswanathan's closely argued and admirably researched book is to show that the exigencies of managing an empire played a far more important role than has hitherto been recognized in the emergence of the discipline as a social practice.
Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is also the author of Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief, which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America, and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She coedits the series South Asia Across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago, and California.
Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Beginnings of English Literary Study
2. Praeparatio Evangelica
3. "One Power, One Mind"
4. Rewriting English
5. Lessons of History
6. The Failure of English
7. Conclusion: Empire and the Western Canon
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index