A landmark work from the author of
Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from
Mansfield Park to
Heart of Darkness and
Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition,
Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.
