The World’s Edge: Imperial Writing and Literary Style

Reading a range of novels that appeared between the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I argue that imperial history does not and cannot exhaust the literary object. Rather, the literary object encodes that history differently than other rhetorical forms — along different contours and with different emphases — and therefore sharply arrays the myriad contradictions and entanglements of our modernity. This difference, though, is discernible only through close attention to the formal constitution of the works themselves. I trace the novel through a particularly fecund period of its development: the passage from British to American empire between 1850-1920