Edward Said, from “Jane Austen and Empire” [from Culture and Imperialism]

In this selection from Culture and Imperialism, a landmark text in postcolonial theory, Edward Said examines Austen’s Mansfield Park with a focus on the relationship between the Bertrams’ titular estate and their property in Antigua. Mansfield Park, he argues, is like many texts of its era in that its form of humanist ideology embraces values that in the late nineteenth century, “the great age of explicit, programmatic colonial expansion,” would reveal themselves to be justifications for British imperialism.

Edward Said, from “Jane Austen and Empire” [from Culture and Imperialism]