Who killed Shakespeare? asks the world outside the university, convinced that something's rotten in the state of academia. Have English professors really tossed out the Bard to take up 'theory' instead? After public relations disasters surrounding 'political correctness', deconstruction, and the Social Text hoax it seems that everyone - politicians, parents, and the press - has something to say about what's wrong with universities. Patrick Brantlinger argues that critiques of the 'university in ruins' are misdirected. Shakespeare, English, and the humanities in general are all being marginalized - not by professors, but by an increasingly corporatized and career-oriented direction in higher education. This provocative look inside the ivory tower is required reading for anyone who thinks he or she knows what's at stake in the modern university.

A call to transform the way we think about property, this book examines how capitalism has from its origins sought to enclose or privatize the commons, or land and other forms of property that had been viewed as communally owned, and argues that neoliberal economic policies and the corporate takeovers of urban spaces, prisons, schools, the mass media, farms, and natural resources have failed to serve the public interest. A study of corporate globalization and the continuation of empire after the era of political decolonization, it begins with the fencing of the West starting in the 1870s, and moves to examine recent phenomena such as urbanization, mass incarceration, financialization, and the treatment of people as commodities in the context of the longue duree of land enclosures, empire, and capitalism. Highlighting the threatened elimination of the public domain as a result of corporate efforts to privatize public utilities, prisons, schools, forests, seeds, and just about everything else that can yield a profit, Barbed Wire: Capitalism and the Enclosure of the Commons asks what it would mean if, instead of either private or public property, our most fundamental conception of property were communal. Would a redefinition of property from a community perspective lead us beyond the military-industrial complex?

"Cultural Studies" has emerged in British and American higher education as a movement that challenges the traditional humanities and social science disciplines. Influenced by the New Left, feminism, and poststructualist literary theory, cultural studies seeks to analyze everday life and the social construction of "subjectivities." Crusoe's Footprints encompasses the movement of many colleges and universities in the 1960s towards such interdisciplinary and "radical" programs as American Studies, Women's Studies, and Afro-American Studies. Brantlinger also examines the role of feminist criticism which has been particularly crucial in both Britain and the U.S.

"Cultural Studies" has emerged in British and American higher education as a movement that challenges the traditional humanities and social science disciplines. Influenced by the New Left, feminism, and poststructualist literary theory, cultural studies seeks to analyze everday life and the social construction of "subjectivities." Crusoe's Footprints encompasses the movement of many colleges and universities in the 1960s towards such interdisciplinary and "radical" programs as American Studies, Women's Studies, and Afro-American Studies. Brantlinger also examines the role of feminist criticism which has been particularly crucial in both Britain and the U.S.

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture. This edition makes her work available, and focuses on her writings on imperialism. It should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women's writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture. This edition makes her work available, and focuses on her writings on imperialism. It should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women's writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture. This edition makes her work available, and focuses on her writings on imperialism. It should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women's writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture. This edition makes her work available, and focuses on her writings on imperialism. It should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women's writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture. This edition makes her work available, and focuses on her writings on imperialism. It should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women's writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.

A call to transform the way we think about property, this book examines how capitalism has from its origins sought to enclose or privatize the commons, or land and other forms of property that had been viewed as communally owned, and argues that neoliberal economic policies and the corporate takeovers of urban spaces, prisons, schools, the mass media, farms, and natural resources have failed to serve the public interest. A study of corporate globalization and the continuation of empire after the era of political decolonization, it begins with the fencing of the West starting in the 1870s, and moves to examine recent phenomena such as urbanization, mass incarceration, financialization, and the treatment of people as commodities in the context of the longue duree of land enclosures, empire, and capitalism. Highlighting the threatened elimination of the public domain as a result of corporate efforts to privatize public utilities, prisons, schools, forests, seeds, and just about everything else that can yield a profit, Barbed Wire: Capitalism and the Enclosure of the Commons asks what it would mean if, instead of either private or public property, our most fundamental conception of property were communal. Would a redefinition of property from a community perspective lead us beyond the military-industrial complex?

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and criticisms of the Empire such as abolitionism, as well as the first stirrings of nationalism in India and elsewhere. Using nineteenth-century literary works as illustrations, it analyzes several major debates, central to imperial and postcolonial studies, about imperial historiography and Marxism, gender and race, Orientalism, mimicry, and subalternity and representation. And it provides an in-depth examination of works by several major Victorian authors-Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Disraeli, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, and Conrad among them - in the imperial context. Key Features: *Links literary texts to debates in postcolonial studies *Discusses works not included in standard literary histories *Provides in-depth discussions and comparisons of major authors: Disraeli and George Eliot; Dickens and Charlotte Bronte; Tennsyon and Yeats *Provides a guide to further reading and a timeline

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and criticisms of the Empire such as abolitionism, as well as the first stirrings of nationalism in India and elsewhere. Using nineteenth-century literary works as illustrations, it analyzes several major debates, central to imperial and postcolonial studies, about imperial historiography and Marxism, gender and race, Orientalism, mimicry, and subalternity and representation. And it provides an in-depth examination of works by several major Victorian authors-Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Disraeli, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, and Conrad among them - in the imperial context. Key Features: *Links literary texts to debates in postcolonial studies *Discusses works not included in standard literary histories *Provides in-depth discussions and comparisons of major authors: Disraeli and George Eliot; Dickens and Charlotte Bronte; Tennsyon and Yeats *Provides a guide to further reading and a timeline

Patrick Brantlinger here examines the commonly held nineteenth-century view that all "primitive" or "savage" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction. Warlike propensities and presumed cannibalism were regarded as simultaneously noble and suicidal, accelerants of the downfall of other races after contact with white civilization. Brantlinger finds at the heart of this belief the stereotype of the self-exterminating savage, or the view that "savagery" is a sufficient explanation for the ultimate disappearance of "savages" from the grand theater of world history.

Humanitarians, according to Brantlinger, saw the problem in the same terms of inevitability (or doom) as did scientists such as Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley as well as propagandists for empire such as Charles Wentworth Dilke and James Anthony Froude. Brantlinger analyzes the Irish Famine in the context of ideas and theories about primitive races in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. He shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, especially through the influence of the eugenics movement, extinction discourse was ironically applied to "the great white race" in various apocalyptic formulations. With the rise of fascism and Nazism, and with the gradual renewal of aboriginal populations in some parts of the world, by the 1930s the stereotypic idea of "fatal impact" began to unravel, as did also various more general forms of race-based thinking and of social Darwinism.

A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration.

Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction.

The most comprehensive study yet of literature and imperialism in the early and mid-Victorian years, Rule of Darkness offers, in addition, a revisionary interpretation of imperialism as a significant factor in later British cultural history, from the 1880s to World War I. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with Victorian culture and society and, more generally, with the relationship between Victorian writers and imperialism, 'and between racist ideology and patterns of domination in modern history.

In Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the "civilizing mission" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with "lesser" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior-an even "fitter" or "higher" race or species. Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts-including Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians by James Bonwick, The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, She by H. Rider Haggard, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and rich Taming Cannibals, Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways.

In Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the "civilizing mission" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with "lesser" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior an even "fitter" or "higher" race or species.

Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts including Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians by James Bonwick, The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, She by H. Rider Haggard, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and rich Taming Cannibals, Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways."

In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present. He draws on literary texts ranging from Augustan satire such as Gulliver's Travels to postmodern satire such as Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note. All critique the misrecognition of public credit as wealth. The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money. Brantlinger traces the emergence of modern, imperial Great Britain from those foundations. He analyzes the process whereby nationalism, both the cause and the result of wars and imperial expansion, multiplied national debt and produced crises of public credit resolved only through more nationalism and war. During the first half of the eighteenth century, conservatives attacked public credit as fetishistic and characterized national debt as alchemical. From the 1850s, the stabilizing theories of public credit authored by David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Thornton, and others, helped initiate the first "social science" economics. In the nineteenth century, literary criticism both paralleled and questioned early capitalist discourse on public credit and nationalism, while the Victorian novel refigured debt as the individual, private credit and debt. During the era of high modernism and Keynesian economics, the notion of high culture as genuine value recast the debate over money and national indebtedness. Brantlinger relates this cultural-historical trajectory to Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories about the decline of the European empires after World War II, the global debt crisis, and the weakening of western nation-states in the postmodern era.

Contents:
1. Introduction: A View from the Ruins 2. Who Killed Shakespeare? What Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties 3. English Departments as Heterotopias 4. Anti-Theory and Its Antitheses: Rhetoric vs. Ideology 5. How the New Historicism Grew Old (and Gained its Tale) 6. Postcolonialism and Its Discontents 7. Between Liberalism and Marxism: The Populism of Cultural Studies 8. Informania U 9. Apocalypse 2001: or, What Happens after Posthistory? 10. Works Cited