Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
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Birgit Neumann
Abstract
The paper explores the centrality of crime fiction to the formation of colonial authority, focussing on an aspect which up to now has received little attention: the confessional narrative. Using Philip Meadows Taylor’s imperial bestseller Confessions of a Thug (1839) as an example, the paper scrutinizes how the confessional narrative is used for legitimising British rule in India. By examining the formal peculiarities of the confessional mode it becomes evident that the confession is furnished with an ambivalent dimension that may not only disrupt the law and order inherent in the genre of crime fiction but that also poses a challenge to the reader and invites considerations on a larger cultural scale. Stories of order and disorder interrogate imperial authority even as they play a key role in its entrenchment
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
