Literary Evangelicalism: The Calcutta Review and the Imperial Anglophone Periodical Circuit

This paper focuses on the Calcutta Review , an Anglo-Indian periodical, to examine its rhetorical exchanges in the 1840s and 1850s with the older journal the Asiatic Researches and its contemporary the North British Review over the value and utility of Indian literatures. I argue that the Calcutta Review ’s construction of Indian literature as a cultural category was defined by Christian evangelicalism, as it contests the authority of Orientalism through an approach that I term “literary evangelicalism.” I conclude by highlighting how these rhetorical exchanges fostered the rise of an imperial Anglophone periodical circuit in the long nineteenth century.