Hugh Clifford and the
Discipline of English Literature
in the Straits Settlements and Malaya
1895-1907
Philip Holden

Fiction written under colonialism at the turn of the 19th century continues to be a contested area of intellectual enquiry. Writers who put imperialism into focus are now also seen as important agents in creating and reinforcing notions of national culture and gender roles. Hugh Clifford was a colonial administrator in the Malaya and Straits Settlements for 50 years, and his Malayan short stories, novels and sketches draw parallels between governing a colony and the discipline of writing a literary text. Philip Holden puts Clifford's writing in the context of the British "Forward Movement" in the Malay Peninsula, the evolving strategies of colonial governance and their reception and reinscription by colonial elites.

PHILIP HOLDEN is Assistant Professor of Literature and Drama at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. He is author of Orienting Masculinity, Orienting Nation: W. Somerset Maugham's Exotic Fiction, and a number of articles on colonial and postcolonial writing and culture in journals such as ARIEL, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jouvert, and Communal/Plural. With his co-editor Richard Ruppell, he is editing a volume of essays provisionally entitled Queer Theory, Colonial Texts for publication by University of Minnesota Press.

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