Haggard Criticism since 1980: Imperial Romance Before and After the Postcolonial Turn

This paper surveys a selection of criticism of H. Rider Haggard, late Victorian British writer of imperial romances known for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). In a period spanning from 1980 to the present, Haggard criticism has evinced a continued interest in issues of gender and imperialism. This fascination was to a great extent influenced by the popularity of postcolonial criticism after 1985. While works by Wendy Katz and Norman Etherington show that earlier discussions of imperialism in Haggard were motivated by debates about Haggard’s status as an author and the literary value of his works, subsequent publications beginning in the late 1980s highlight the complicated and often ambivalent nature of Haggard’s relationship with imperial discourse. As multiple critics from the 1990s have shown, Haggard’s works, whether understood in relation to the literary culture of the imperial capital or the colonized spaces of South Africa, often reflect anxieties about Britain’s imperial power as well as Britain’s imperial designs on the places and peoples of Africa. Critics after 2000, however, must contend with a field saturated by postcolonial approaches to Haggard. Rather than return to the issues of imperialism and gender, recent critics of Haggard rely on approaches from textual studies and cultural history to explore newer, more specific aspects of Haggard’s work.