Journal article

Publication year: 2010

Pages: 89-102

Journal: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Volume number: 58

Issue number: 2

ISSN: 0044-2305

eISSN: 2196-4726

Publisher: De Gruyter Brill

Abstract: 
The paper explores the centrality of crime fiction to the formation of colonial authority, focussing on an aspect which up to now has received little attention: the confessional narrative. Using Philip Meadows Taylor's imperial bestseller Confessions of a Thug (1839) as an example, the paper scrutinizes how the confessional narrative is used for legitimising British rule in India. By examining the formal peculiarities of the confessional mode it becomes evident that the confession is furnished with an ambivalent dimension that may not only disrupt the law and order inherent in the genre of crime fiction but that also poses a challenge to the reader and invites considerations on a larger cultural scale. Stories of order and disorder interrogate imperial authority even as they play a key role in its entrenchment.

Harvard Citation style: Neumann, B. (2010) Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 58(2), pp. 89-102

APA Citation style: Neumann, B. (2010). Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. 58(2), 89-102.