This dissertation investigates the relationships among Victorian literacy and history pedagogies, colonial discourse analysis, and colonial texts produced in the early twentieth century. The first four chapters address texts written in the wake of the 1902-03 and 1911-12 Coronation Durbars held in Delhi, India. The epilogue analyzes E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and encourages new research on Modernist colonial literature like George Orwell’s Burmese Days and Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet and twentieth-century Indian writings like Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World and Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. The dissertation suggests a new way of reading non-fictional documents, Edwardian and Modernist colonial fiction, and Indian literature and non-fiction: as history lessons which advocate best citizenship practices in relation to a global empire. While the Coronation Durbar documents promote the viability of the Empire, the texts discussed in the Epilogue argue that for any type of relationship between Britain and India to be successful, decolonization must occur. These lessons, though they seem to contradict one another, both work to protect the relationship between India and Britain and the status of the British homeland.
Looking at the intersection of two often unrelated discourses—rhetorical genre studies and colonial/post-colonial discourse theory—I argue that early twentieth-century texts took up the genre of the history lesson by creating and promoting similar “typified rhetorical actions” to those the history lessons created by late-Victorian pedagogues. The texts analyzed in the dissertation attempt to provide readers with background information, teach them how to understand cause and effect between historical events, and above all, urge patriotism and loyalty, integral parts of the Victorian history lesson. This literature was targeted to an increasingly literate and educated public and attempted to teach British readers not only about the colony, but also worked to persuade them to read the colony in a different way.