African adventure and metropolitan dissent in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882)

Jackson, R

Abstract

Recent studies of late 19th-century imperialism have challenged postcolonial arguments for the existence of a uniform imperial culture in colonial Britain that unquestioningly supported its overseas expansionist agenda. Through a cultural materialist reading of Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882), this article extends these critical challenges to claims for a cohesive colonial society by exploring moments of textual and biographical dissent in relation to African adventure and travel writing. It demonstrates the way in which colonial pursuits in the African interior control and devastate metropolitan worlds. It additionally considers a range of oppositional responses that unite the novel’s metropolitan heroine and labourers against the African colonizer. Examples in Hardy’s tale of radical scepticism in relation to debasing representations of autochthonous cultures are likewise evaluated in this article for the riposte they offer to 19th-century travel writing about Africa.

Citation

Jackson, R. (2020). African adventure and metropolitan dissent in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882). Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(1), 126-139. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1678060

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Jan 24, 2020
• Publication Date: Jan 24, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jan 28, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 28, 2020
• Journal: Journal of Postcolonial Writing
• Print ISSN: 1744-9855
• Publisher: Routledge
• Volume: 56
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 126-139
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1678060
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2019.1678060
• Related Public URLs: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjpw20/current