With the rise of postcolonial criticism in the 1980s,scholarship has increasingly focused on Charles Dickens's views on race and empire in his novels.His unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood has sparked a debate over whether Dickens was an imperialist or an anti-imperialist.Dan Simmons'neo-Victorian novel Drood,which presents Dickens and Col-lins as the protagonists and reconstructs a Dickensian portrayal of London,fictionalizes their imagination of the racial other Drood and the undertown which he ruled,highlighting the moral anxiety over the legitimacy of empire and the fear of retaliation from the colonized,triggered by the turmoil of the overseas colonies and the sharp social contradictions at home in the second half of the 19th century.This paper attempts to offer an analysis of the underclass space and racial other in Drood drawing on discussions of reverse colonization fantasy in a postcolonial context so as to reveal the postmodern reconstruction of the Victori-an middle-class's paradoxical imperial consciousness in contemporary cultural critical discourse.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
