| Ungoverned Imaginings Contributor(s): Majeed, Javed (Author) |
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ISBN: 0198117868 ISBN-13: 9780198117865 Publisher: Clarendon Press OUR PRICE: $209.00 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: July 1992 Annotation: This book re-examines British attitudes to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It places the emergence of utilitarianism in the context of these attitudes by focussing on James Mill's The History of British India (1817), and the work of Sir William Jones, Robert Southey, and Thomas Moore. In particular the study shows how the standard view of Mill's History does not do justice to the complexity of this text; Majeed argues that aesthetics played an important role in the formulation of Mill's utilitarian views, when he used British India as part of a much larger critique of British society itself. Mill's attempt to place thinking on these issues on a different footing illumines other scholars and poets whose writing on the Orient was an important part of the defining of their religious, social, and political views. Ungoverned Imaginings demonstrates how complex British attitudes to India were in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this might be explained in the light of domestic and imperial contexts. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Asia - India & South Asia - History | Europe - Great Britain - General - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Dewey: 954.03 |
| LCCN: 92008987 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.84" W x 9.22" (0.99 lbs) 234 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 18th Century - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Cultural Region - British Isles - Cultural Region - Indian |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This is a study of the emergence of Utilitarianism as a new political language in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It describes the relationship between this language, defined by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and the complexities of British Imperial experience in India at the time. Majeed concentrates on the role which the formulation of aesthetic and linguistic attitudes played as components of British views on India. These attitudes were related to the definition of cultural identities, with which both Utilitarianism and the conservatism of the time were preoccupied. This was also a major preoccupation in the work of Robert Southey and Thomas Moore, which has generally been neglected and misunderstood. By placing their work in the context of the attack by Utilitarianism on the conservatism of this period and its influence on British policy in India, the complexity of the issues which were dealt with in this body of literature is revealed. |