Amy R. Wong. Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk Redwood City

Voice has been an ongoing area of interest for literary scholars of British studies who engage with gender, class, and empire. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century postcolonial scholars of voice base their theoretical foundations on the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. While focusing primarily upon the colonized subject. Amy Wong’s Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk introduces a new dimension to this critical conversation by shifting attention to the voice of the colonizer whose articulacy is under pressure. Four late-Victorian texts are explored for the ways they imagine the end of colonial worlding (a Spivak term the author employs) when speech, as an expressive act of self-possession necessary for the maintenance of the colonial self, unravels.