The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930

Kate Flint

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691203188, 9780691131207
• eBook ISBN: 9780691210254
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book takes a fascinating look at the iconic figure of the Native American in the British cultural imagination from the Revolutionary War to the early twentieth century, and examining how Native Americans regarded the British, as well as how they challenged their own cultural image in Britain during this period. Kate Flint shows how the image of the Indian was used in English literature and culture for a host of ideological purposes, and she reveals its crucial role as symbol, cultural myth, and stereotype that helped to define British identity and its attitude toward the colonial world.

Through close readings of writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and D. H. Lawrence, Flint traces how the figure of the Indian was received, represented, and transformed in British fiction and poetry, travelogues, sketches, and journalism, as well as theater, paintings, and cinema. She describes the experiences of the Ojibwa and Ioway who toured Britain with George Catlin in the 1840s; the testimonies of the Indians in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and the performances and polemics of the Iroquois poet Pauline Johnson in London. Flint explores transatlantic conceptions of race, the role of gender in writings by and about Indians, and the complex political and economic relationships between Britain and America.

The Transatlantic Indian, 1776-1930 argues that native perspectives are essential to our understanding of transatlantic relations in this period and the development of transnational modernity.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• CHAPTER ONE Figuring America
• CHAPTER TWO The Romantic Indian
• CHAPTER THREE “Brought to the Zenith of Civilization”: Indians in England in the 1840s
• CHAPTER FOUR Sentiment and Anger: British Women Writers and Native Americans
• CHAPTER FIVE Is the Indian an American?
• CHAPTER SIX Savagery and Nationalism: Native Americans and Popular Fiction
• CHAPTER SEVEN Indians and the Politics of Gender
• CHAPTER EIGHT Indians and Missionaries
• CHAPTER NINE Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and English Identity
• CHAPTER TEN Indian Frontiers
• CONCLUSION Indians, Modernity, and History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index