The Empire of Things in Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Consumption of the Foreign and Imperial Self-Fashioning

Abstract

The paper is devoted to exploring representations of colonial things in early eighteenth-century literature. In numerous literary and economic texts of this period, colonial luxuries come to represent the main objectives of imperialism. Literary representations of colonial things are engaged in negotiating the precarious relationship between England and its colonial others and express many of the uncertainties brought about by the emergence of imperialism and mercantile capitalism. Social positionings, class and gender relations were acted out in and through the world of objects, thus fashioning the imperial subject as a possessor of colonial goods. What is constructed in literature is, therefore, not so much a narrative of a specific colonial thing but rather a narrative of a subject's relation to that object. It is shown that the role of things in establishing an imperial ideology raises related questions about gender and thus provides an opportunity to consider the correlative workings of gender and empire.