Research Catalog

Reading the splendid body : gender and consumerism in eighteenth-century British writing on India

Title: Reading the splendid body : gender and consumerism in eighteenth-century British writing on India / Nandini Bhattacharya.
Author: Bhattacharya, Nandini.
Publication: Newark : University of Delaware Press ; London : Associated University Presses, ©1998.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	PR129.I5 B49 1998	Off-site

Details

Description

232 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

This book surveys an underlying discourse on female and oriental consumerism in nearly four centuries of British colonialist narratives on India. It examines some of the significant ways in which the subaltern and female body was constructed by Western ethnographers within early modern British colonialist discourses. The book offers a genealogy of colonialist spectatorship, and examines the ideologies originating within both public and private colonial spheres. Through a comparison of the discourses about and by women one can see the continuation of patriarchal injunctions within Western protofeminist discourses. Economic, ethical, colonial, patriarchal, and protofeminist polemics thus reached to and shaped one another, and this book is a record of the complex ways in which gender discourses and colonialist discourses intersected to create a colonialist spectatorship that constituted non-Western and female subjects as spectacular and needing discipline. The insights on Western protofeminists and their crisis of self-representation as subjects versus objects of discourse also further the examination of women's history in the colonial arena.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-222) and index.

Contents

1. Erotic Economies: Consumption and the Subaltern Woman's Body -- 2. The Queen's Private Body: Sir Thomas Roe in the Court of Jahangir -- 3. The Language of Ethnopolitical Gendering in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe: Chastening the Subaltern Female Body -- 4. Ideal Woman or Ideal Consumer? The Drama of the "Female Nabob" -- 5. Behind the Veil: The Many Masks of Subaltern Sexuality.

ISBN

0874136121
9780874136128

LCCN

97005222

OCLC

ocm36675938
36675938
SCSB-351927

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library