Lands of Desire and Loss develops an interdisciplinary approach connecting the literary and geographical imagination which shape British perception and representation of colonial and postcolonial spaces. Through her readings of literary works belonging to the dawn of colonial enterprises (Walter Raleigh's The Discoverie of Guiana and Shakespeare's The Tempest), the heyday of the British Empire (H. Rider Haggard's She and W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions) and the postcolonial consciousness refashioning old myths and cultural tropes (V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World), the author highlights the crucial role of ideology in narrative plots and literary metaphors concerning space. The imaginative focus of the book is El Dorado, a geographical and literary construction created and recreated at different times, shaped and reshaped in British colonial and postcolonial writing.

Autorentext

Nicoletta Brazzelli holds a PhD in English Studies. She graduated both in Human Geography and English Literature at the University of Milan, where she now teaches English Culture. Her research focuses on travel writing, exploration narratives, nineteenth-century romance, postcolonial fiction and contemporary literature. She has published on Mary Kingsley, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Falcon Scott, V.S Naipaul and Beryl Bainbridge.

Inhalt

Contents: Geography, imagination and literature Geopoetics: representing space The contemporary spatial turn Textuality and narration Colonial and postcolonial geographies Cartographies of the British Empire The myth of Eldorado Imperial eyes: the lands of colonial desire Haggard s South Africa: a landscape of dreams Fin de siècle topographies of imperial male desire Hudson s South America: the lost world of the forest The postcolonial gaze: visions of loss Postcolonial displacement and dislocation Reconfiguring time and space in the postcolonial perspective V.S. Naipaul s representation of Trinidad El Dorado: spatial desire, failure and loss.