The contributions to this book amply demonstrate the richness, vitality,
and complexity of the colonial transactions between Britain and India
over the last two centuries, and they do so by approaching the topic
from a specific perspective: by interpreting the rubric 'new readings'
as broadly, creatively, and productively as possible. They cover a wide
range of literary responses and genres: eighteenth-century drama, the
gothic novel, verse, autobiography, history, religious writing,
journalism, women's memoirs, travel writing, popular fiction, and the
modernist novel. Brought together in one volume, these essays offer a
small, but representative sample of the multifaceted literary and
cultural traffic between Britain and India in the colonial period. In
the richness and diversity of the various contributors' strategies and
interpretations, these new readings urge us to return once again to
texts that we think we know, as well as to explore those that we do not,
with a freshly renewed sense of their complexity, immediacy, and
relevance.