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Although postcolonialism has emerged as one of the most significant
theoretical movements in literary and cultural studies, it has paid
scant attention to the importance of trade and trade relations to
debates about culture. Focusing on the past two centuries, this
volume investigates the links among trade, colonialism, and forms
of representation, posing the question, 'What is the historical or
modern relationship between economic inequality and imperial
patterns of representation and reading?' Rather than dealing
exclusively with a particular industry or type of industry, the
contributors take up the issue of how various economies have been
represented in Aboriginal art; in literature by North American,
Caribbean, Portuguese, South African, First Nations, Australian,
British, and Aboriginal authors; and in a diverse range of writings
that includes travel diaries, missionary texts, the findings of the
Leprosy Investigation Commission, early medical accounts and media
representations of HIV/AIDS. Examining trade in commodities as
various as illicit drugs, liquor, bananas, tourism, adventure
fiction, and modern Aboriginal art, as well as cultural exchanges
in politics, medicine, and literature, the essays reflect the
widespread origins of the contributors themselves, who are based
throughout the English-speaking world. Taken as a whole, this book
contests the commonplace view promoted by some modern
economists-that trade in and of itself has a leveling effect,
equalising cultures, places, and peoples-demonstrating instead the
ways in which commerce has created and exacerbated differences in
power.
The enchantment of English is a study of the teaching of English in
Australian universities, from its beginnings in the second half of
the nineteenth century through to the 1960s and 1970s, a period in
which universities proliferated and diversified. Written from the
belief that every discipline is enhanced by understanding the
arguments made for its existence and the conditions in which it was
established, the author aims to help students and colleagues to
think critically about the impact of institutional location in
forming our habits of mind. Amidst these stories of politics,
critical debates, scrambling for appointments in specific areas and
disputes about the need to satisfy the demands of students and the
public for 'usefulness', this history reveals something intangible
but durable: the power of the literary text over the imagination,
and the power of the idea of England and its writers as a basis and
motive for reading and study - hence, The enchantment of English.
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