Post-Empire Imaginaries?: Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires

Empires as political entities may be a thing of the past, but as a concept, empire is alive and kicking. From heritage tourism and costume dramas to theories of the imperial idea(l): empire sells. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires presents innovative scholarship on the lives and legacies of empires in diverse media such as literature, film, advertising, and the visual arts. Though rooted in real space and history, the post-empire and its twin, the post-imperial, emerge as ungraspable ideational constructs. The volume convincingly establishes empire as welcoming resistance and affirmation, introducing post-empire imaginaries as figurations that connect the archives and repertoires of colonial nostalgia, postcolonial critique, post-imperial dreaming.

Barbara Buchenau, Ph.D. (2002), University of Göttingen, is Professor of North American Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her publications include a book on American settler fiction; a monograph on Typecasting in Colonial North America is under preparation.

Virginia Richter, Ph.D. (1997), University of Munich, is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her numerous publications include Literature after Darwin. Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Marijke Denger is currently completing her PhD on community in contemporary postcolonial novels at the University of Bern, Switzerland.


Contributors are: Elsie Cloete, Mayannah N. Dahlheim, Rainer Emig, Elena Furlanetto, Jana Gohrisch, Alfred Hiatt, Kerstin Knopf, Donna Landry, Karsten Levihn-Kutzler, Michael Meyer, Eva-Maria Müller, Timo Müller, Eva M. Pérez, Judith Raiskin, Cecile Sandten, Silke Stroh, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein.