British Imperial Literature, 1870-1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire

This book is a sweeping study of the way British writers used imperial service as a stage for dramatizing new modes of social order and self-consciousness. An expanding administrative machine, Bivona argues, naturalized and domesticated bureaucratic forms of social control, inscribing the ideals of service, submission, discipline, and renunciation in the hearts and minds of the young men employed in administrating the empire. Bivona examines how this governing ideology is treated in Kipling, Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, Forster, Cary and Orwell.