Ideological Landscapes in G. O. Trevelyan’s ‘An Indian Railway’: An Ecostylistic Analysis

VIRDIS, DANIELA FRANCESCA

2012-01-01

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Abstract

In 1862, the British politician Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet (1838-1928) departed to colonial India as a civil servant, and subsequently spent several years there; in 1864, he published the collection Letters of a Competition Wallah, which included twelve fictionalised ‘letters home’ which had previously appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine. “Letter II” (Trevelyan 1864: 21-46), a long sequence of which was partially reprinted in Trevelyan (1998: 3-8) with the title of “An Indian Railway”, depicts a train journey in the Bengali countryside and environment, and conveys its fictional author’s enthusiastic, romantic and positively value-laden remarks about the British railway facilities and infrastructure in the subcontinent. In this paper, I analyse the sequence “An Indian Railway” by applying the theoretical frameworks and the methodologies of ecostylistics (Goatly 2010; Wales 2010), i.e., of the new critical approach which combines ecolinguistics (Coupe 2000; Garrard 2004) with mainstream stylistics (Simpson 1993; Verdonk & Weber 1995; Short 1996; Weber 1996; Simpson 1997; Toolan 1998; Douthwaite 2000; Toolan 2001; Carter & Stockwell 2007; Leech & Short 2007 [1981]; Leech 2008; Jeffries 2009). To be more exact, I examine the representation of the Bengali landscape as a whole and in its component parts, and I attempt to prove that the natural scenery and its features are not exclusively ornamental but, rather, are functional to the colonial ideology communicated by the British author through his fictional text. My main research purpose is to identify and describe the semantic devices and the stylistic strategies which are deployed to portray and evaluate the Bengali countryside while also expressing the British colonial ideology and perspective on occupied India.