Background
Brantlinger, Patrick was born on March 20, 1941 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Son of Morgan Wilson and Lavon Ruth (Patrick) Brantlinger.
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Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
( A major contribution to the cultural and literary histo...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801497671/?tag=2022091-20
Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Institutional Studies)
(In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cult...)
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 of which 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 romanticism both paralleled and questioned early capitalist discourse on public credit and nationalism, while the Victorian novel refigured the national debt as 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 alter World War II,the global debt crisis, and the weakening of western nation-states in the postmodern era.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801482879/?tag=2022091-20
Patrick Brantlinger
Edit ProfileEducation
Bachelor, Antioch College, 1964; Master of Arts, Harvard University, 1965; Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1968.
Career
Professor of English, Indiana U., Bloomington, since 1968; chair department English, Indiana U., Bloomington, 1990-1994.
Achievements
Works
book
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Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
( A major contribution to the cultural and literary histo...)
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Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Institutional Studies)
(In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cult...)
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Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
Membership
Member Midwest Victorian Studies Association (president 1990-1992), Modern Language Association.
Connections
Married Ellen Anderson, June21, 1963. Children: Andrew, Susan, Jeremy.
