Fictions of empire: Colonial India and nineteenth-century children's literature

"Fictions of Empire: Colonial India and Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature" explores the ways in which children's literature intervenes in colonial history through the medium of childhood agency and argues that the English child is deployed in these narratives to serve Britain's imperial aspirations. This project poses an interesting methodological problem since all the main line of contemporary children's literature theory argues that the child, like Edward Said's Oriental "other", is marginalized, silenced and subalternized. However, this formulation cannot be applied to colonial children's fiction, as English children not only have tremendous agency, but seem to have greater influence on their alien environment than adults, who are often debased and corrupted by their experience in the colonies. Instead of being the marginalized "other" conceptualized most notably by Jacqueline Rose and Perry Nodelman, in colonial literature, the child does the "othering" of the colonized world. Thus these children are not only spokespersons for British colonialism, but are also central in the process of consolidating power in the colonies. This study consists of an introduction and four chapters. The introduction spells out theories of childhood agency in colonial children's literature. The first chapter argues that Mary Sherwood's Little Henry and his Bearer (1814) intervenes in the early nineteenth-century theological debates that foreground the issue of missionary activity in colonial Bengal. The second chapter argues that Barbara Hofland's Captives in India (1834) is an imperial bildungsroman for young adolescents which explores the notion that the East has the potential to taint and corrupt Britons, especially young impressionable boys and girls on the brink of adulthood. The third chapter argues that in The Story of Sonny Sahib (1895) Sara Jeanette Duncan presents the young country-bred English boy as the ideal post-Mutiny survivor who has the ability to understand and serve both English and Indian cultures. The last chapter argues that Rudyard Kipling's desire to systematize and prescribe all aspects of jungle-life in The Jungle Books (1894) can be traced back to his rejection of the rise of the Indian national movement in the late nineteenth century.