Review of Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature by Tara Ghoshal Wallace

Abstract

A review of Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature, written by Tara Ghoshal Wallace, published by Bucknell in 2010. "...the latest entry in a lineage of scholarship that examines how Britain forged its identity by defining and opposing itself to an 'Other.' Colonialism, of course, provided Britain with a wealth of such '‘Others'....Ms. Wallace is interested in how Scotland and England forged a new British identity after the Acts of Union by contrasting themselves with a 'foreign' threat. But she chooses none of the usual suspects: for her, England's 'other' is neither the French nor even principally the colonized. It is the colonial project itself."