Books by Patrick Brantlinger

Lively and well written, Bread and Circuses analyzes theories that have treated mass culture as either a symptom or a cause of social decadence. Discussing many of the most influential and representative theories of mass culture, it ranges widely from Greek and Roman origins, through Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and the...

This provocative look inside the ivory tower is required reading for anyone who thinks he or she knows what's at stake in the modern university.

In Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet...

Brantlinger offers an introduction to the rapidly growing field of cultural studies, charting its development in both Britain and America and assessing the contribution of a range of theory from phenomenology to psychoanalysis.

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and criticisms of the Empire such as abolitionism, as well as the first stirrings of nationalism in India and elsewhere.Using nineteenth-century literary works as illustrations, it analyzes several major debates, central to imperial and postcolonial studies, about imperial historiography and Marxism, gender and race, Orientalism, mimicry, and subalternity and representation. And it provides an in-depth examination of works by several major Victorian authors-Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Disraeli, Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, and Conrad among them - in the imperial context. Key Features:*Links literary texts to debates in postcolonial studies*Discusses works not included in standard literary histories*Provides in-depth discussions and comparisons of major authors: Disraeli and George Eliot; Dickens and Charlotte Bronte; Tennsyon and Yeats*Provides a guide to further reading and a timeline

In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present.

Brantlinger here examines the commonly held 19th-century view that all "primitive" races around the world were doomed sooner or later to extinction.

A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, this book maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology.