Promoting a Life

This chapter suggests the ways in which the conjunction between promotion as biographical publicity, self-promotion and career promotion may have been a matter of historically specific struggles over the definition of manliness even, or perhaps especially, when the writers and readers involved were themselves Anglo-Indian officials. It explores evident in the reception of Philip Meadows Taylor&s;s posthumous The Story of My Life . Taylor&s;s Story, is a colonial memoir proccupied with rank and advancement, a memoir, furthermore, far from innocent of the self-congratulation Parry discerns in the self-writing of Anglo-Indian administrators of the Victorian period. The Story, like many of Taylor&s;s novels, depicts a subject &s;open to the heteroglossia of colonial life&s;, to borrow Nancy L. Paxton&s;s phrase. Taylor&s;s demise is thus taken to mark a watershed in the history of colonial masculinity: the breaking of &s;a link between the past and present of India&s;.

Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Irish and British Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology