About this Book

"What makes Holden's study especially interesting is his careful analysis not only of Clifford's unique role as administrator and writer, but his probing of Clifford's doubts about the colonial enterprise. The central contradiction of colonialism pervades his fiction. In its late nineteenth-century guise colonialism promised improvement and the uplifting of subject peoples, yet it could not admit them to a position of social equality since at that moment the basis for colonialism would vanish.