Imagining Africa

Best known as the author of King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard was one of the most popular late-Victorian novelists, and his works continue to be influential today. Stiebel brings a full-length study of Haggard's use of landscape in his African romances. The volume approaches Haggard's construction of an imaginary African landscape as a product of late-Victorian wishful thinking about Africa, analyzing his African topography as a vast Eden, a wilderness, a dream underworld, a home to ancient white civilizations, and a sexualized metaphor for the human body. While the work looks primarily at his pre-1892 romances, which were his most powerful, it also gives attention to his nonfiction and unpublished papers. Because Haggard's writings embodied the spirit of his age, this book is an essential guide to late-Victorian concepts of Africa, colonization, and the British Empire.