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Title: Delusions and Discoveries: India in the British Imagination, 1880-1930 by Benita Parry, Michael Sprinker ISBN: 1-85984-128-7 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: December, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: The Cornerstone of Postcolonial Studies
Comment: This book, originally published in 1972, is a real pleasure. Its focus is on English fictions created about India during the Raj but it predates todays postcolonial theory and is therefore free of the latters penchant for rarefied jargon. Parry in her introduction to the new edition examines current trends in postcolonial theory and she finds them to have strayed away from the plain facts of history and become lost in a hybrid analysis of texts which places too much emphasis on discursive ambiguity and not enough on the plain fact of the economic exploitation which informs all colonizer/colonized encounters. You will only get this new essay if you get the new revised Verso edition(published 1997)which also includes an introductory essay by the always on the mark Michael Sprinker so beware the old editions on sale.
The lengthy first chapter offers a detailed account of the evolving nature of the colonizer/colonized relationship from initial conquest to independence struggle with many excellently chosen quotes from numerous diaries/travel logs/ memoirs/literary sources etc...Unlike Saids Orientalism which came later and owes a great debt to this book as do all of the postcolonial practitioners, Parry spends considerable time supporting her carefully stated views. She was writing at a time when the Raj revival was just about to reach its zenith and so this book was one assumes written at least in part as a counter to all the sentimental and fond accounts of the English for their empire. Parry gives the best account I have yet read of what the actual Anglo-Indian rulers were like in India though there are other valuable accounts including Indian accounts which I would also highly recommend(Indian Tales of the Raj). Parry deals with familiar names like Kipling and Forster but also with some unfamiliar names including female novelists and travel writers. Her views on Kipling broke new ground and have yet to be bettered though many have tried(Moore-Gilbert, Suleri).
I've read many related books including Suleri's Rhetoric of English India, & Moore-Gilberts Writing India & can easily say this is the best book of its kind. Amazingly insightful for 1972 or for 2002 and a real breath of common sense fresh air to the school of thinkers that came along in the 1987-1997 era and were so dominated by the influence of Derrida and Foucault and offered an ever diminishing amount of insight and an ever increasing amount of arcane verbiage. The re-publication of this frimly grounded work will perhaps assist in re-focusing postcolonial studies, one can only hope.
It is very interesting that in her introduction Parry mentions Said several times but quotes only from Culture and Imperialism, a book with a much firmer and more plainly spoken grasp of the relationship between empire and literature than its predecessor, the infinitely more famous Orientalism. Said in turn pays homage to Parry on the back cover acknowledging her influence and rightly so. Delusions and Discoveries really deserves to be the book given the credit for initiating the modern phase of postcolonial studies.

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