This study explores the cultural and political impact of Victorian travelers' descriptions of physical and verbal violence in Africa. Travel narratives provide a rich entry into the shifting meanings of colonialism, as formal imperialism replaced informal control in the Nineteenth century. Offering a wide-ranging approach to travel literature's significance in Victorian life, this book features analysis of physical and verbal violence in major exploration narratives as well as lesser-known volumes and newspaper accounts of expeditions. It also presents new perspectives on Olive Schreiner and Joseph Conrad by linking violence in their fictional travelogues with the rhetoric of humanitarian trusteeship.

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LAURA E. FRANEY is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Women's Studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. She specializes in Victorian literature, postcolonial literature, and the history of the novel.

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Acknowledgements Introduction 'The Devil's Own Tattoo': Prefiguring Imperial Sovereignty in Exploration Narratives 'A Pulpy Mass of Churned-Up Flesh': Exploring the Complexity of Pulverization Damaged Bodies and Imperial Ideology in the Travel Fiction of Haggard, Schreiner, and Conrad Blurring Boundaries, Forming a Discipline: Violence and Anthropological Collecting 'Tongues Cocked and Loaded': Women Travel Writers and Verbal Violence Epilogue Notes Works Cited Primary Sources Secondary Sources