New Books In Literary Studies

Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion of 1867 in Ireland. The book argues that these rebellions—while arguably unsuccessful in their particular moments—signaled turning points in the management of labor throughout the British Empire. As the disciplinary methods used by imperial forces shifted in the nineteenth century—for example, the abolition of slavery and the rise of wage labor—so too did the resistive practices of the colonized. Drawing from a rich variety of primary sources ranging from political economic tracts to photographs and poems to novels, Reddy highlights the complex dynamic between laboring bodies and oppressive political and economic structures amid shif