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Anxieties of the Mission of Empire in Robert Southey’s Madoc
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2023
My fifth chapter extends my investigation of how epic could facilitate the imagining of a coordination of evangelism and imperialism and also provide, through tensions inherent in the genre, space to critique of the developing ideology of Christian imperialism. I examine Robert Southey’s Madoc as a cautious depiction of Christian conversion: even as Southey regards it as uplifting and beneficial, he expresses wariness about evangelism’s potential to sanction injustice. Conveying the remnants of Southey’s misgivings about the tyrannical potential of established religion, along with his suspicion about the overly enthusiastic zeal of many missionaries, Madoc traces similarities between Christians and non-Christians as a technique to affirm colonial authority, even as it strives to contain the tensions summoned by this strategy. Through his revisions of the epic genre, Southey advocates a need continuously to reform Christianity, empire, and epic, and so continuously to purge them of a tyrannous potential that he believed accompanied them.
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