The cult of the Virgin Mary went global during the early modern period, as Catholics embraced her with renewed fervor in the wake of Protestant attacks. Using one of Mary’s most famous advocations as a case study, this chapter investigates the origins, spread, and reinvention of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Mexico, and in the Philippines, demonstrating both the causes and limitations of her success across different parts of the Spanish empire.

When Catholicism went global during the early modern period, it did so through the practices, idioms, and procedures of sanctity, in an uneven, messy, embodied process that often escaped control. Well beyond the papacy’s formal processes of beatification and canonization, the worldwide early modern Catholic community was united by belief in the continued immanence of the sacred and the supernatural in everyday life, especially through the cult of saints. The quest for and defense of sanctity defined early modern Catholicism. Every aspect of its pursuit also refuted the new Protestant dogmas of sola fide, sola Scriptura, and sola gratia. This Companion therefore offers sanctity as a new prism through which to envision the Catholic Church in the early modern era.

Catholics continued to make pilgrimages, near and far, during the early modern period, despite the challenges of the Reformation. Drawing on examples from Western Europe and beyond, this chapter follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

This chapter examines the ways in which Victorian industrial novels, which emerged on the British literary scene in the early 1840s, revealed – and in many ways concealed – the imperial and racial structures that were fundamental to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Also termed “condition of England” novels, these narratives critiqued current social hierarchies while guarding themselves from appearing to promote working-class revolts. In addition, they had to negotiate how (or whether) to represent the extent to which British imperialism fueled industrialism’s acts of dehumanization and violence. Focusing on industrial novels written by authors including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, the essay explores two central ways in which these texts addressed these connections to race and empire: first, through representations of British factory workers in terms that evoked transatlantic slavery and imperial otherness; and second, through British spaces and colonial objects that called forth the imperial stories and identities often suppressed in industrial novels.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

Travel or adventure drama became a staple of English theatre with British maritime expansion. Renaissance drama’s mercantile poetics lionized middle-class traders, but foreign exotica also provoked deep unease. The emergent imperial consciousness was at once ambitious and anxious. The nascent British Empire’s dynamic of emulation and disavowal produces “peripheral heroics.” Voyage drama’s glorification of English deeds abroad follows Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’s arc of heroic action with unlikely protagonists – women, middle-class adventurers, pirates, and merchants – rising from low social origins to claim a place at imperial centers. Their decidedly middle-class status is defensively justified by nobility of character. A strong Christian strain frames that valor in terms of humility and even martyrdom. Racialized encounters with Islamic characters abjure the foreign taint, by redirecting it at European rivals, the Spanish and the Dutch. Defined by English marginality, this heroism is marked by ambivalences, with shifting and flexible modes of gendering and racializations. Through transnational figures with malleable identities, Renaissance drama negotiated English marginality in an interimperial context, exploring through peripheral heroics English desires for and fears of transculturation, their emulation and disavowal of empire.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

Walter Scott’s “classical form of the historical novel” establishes a plot of modern national formation through political absorption into a greater imperial union through the dialectical clash of opposing forces. Relocating agency from individual persons to an impersonal historical process, the novel generates soft or weak protagonists who waver between political allegiance and – with the biologization of historical purpose later in the nineteenth century – between dispositions of gender, sex, and race. The historical novel is refitted for Victorian imperial romance and its ideological program of “Greater Britain,” a global union of English-speaking peoples, in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! Historical novels written in the imperial peripheries – in Quebec and Bengal – adapt the “Greater Britain” plot and destabilize it from within. Aubert de Gaspé’s Les anciens Canadiens justifies the conquest of New France through an equivalence between French settlers and Scottish Highlanders, which is derailed by a third group the Indians, the actual natives whose elimination secures the imperial dispensation. In Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath, an eighteenth-century Hindu rebellion against Mughal overlords prepares the way for the future ascendancy of an independent Indian nation in which synthesis with imperial Britain is only a passing stage.

Metropolitan liberal thinkers idealized settler colonialism as the positive face of nineteenth-century imperialism. The developmental logic of stadial thought played an enduring role in asserting settlement’s racially demarcated conception of civilization and sociability. A variety of forms of settler narrative from Australia and New Zealand circulated widely in Britain and their portrayals of character engaged directly with those civilizing claims. The chapter first considers two contrasting accounts of cultural contact: Arthur Phillip’s The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (1789), and Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand, a Tale of the Good Old Times (1863). It then addresses the thematizing of settler criminality in Australian novels: Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870–72), Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under Arms (1882–83), and Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886). It lastly assesses the delineation of gender roles in short story collections set in frontier environments: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902), and G. B. Lancaster’s Sons o’ Men (1905). While representations of settler character interrogated liberalism’s justification of colonization as a means of civilizational progress and improvement, settlement’s racialized foundations of possessive individualism also remained visible but were largely unchallenged.

This chapter explores the place of empire and imperialism in the British literature of the Popular Front period (1934–40). During this period, left-aligned writers responded to the Communist International’s call for broad antifascist alliances built on national cultural traditions with an outpouring of works of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as critical reevaluations of literary history. These contributions are characterized by an evocation of “the people” as a diverse, progressive, antifascist subject, but one always national in character and therefore fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. The chapter considers the ways that writers based in Britain negotiated the connections between antifascism, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism in this late interwar moment. It focuses first on the literary milieu around the influential journal Left Review, and second on the interlinked work of Ralph Fox, Mulk Raj Anand, and Sajjad Zaheer. In concludes by suggesting that the Spanish Civil War provided the occasion for some leftist writers from Scotland and Wales to imagine the continuities between working-class history, anticolonialism, and antifascism in their work.