Ever since the nineteenth-century the imperial romance has been understood, on some level, not merely as a self-evident genre of adventure capable of producing an aesthetic experience but as a political construction of ideological identifications and exclusions. There is a serious dearth of critical work on late-imperial writers of popular romances written about the Anglo-African colonies and the regions beyond their imperial frontiers. A growing interest in Africa now means that even the Ang...

Ernest George Henham (1870-1948), writing both under his own name and with the pseudonym of "John Trevena," has until now been a "lost" writer, yet of remarkable achievement; indeed, he is a writer of greater range and power than any other West Country author with the possible exception of the more celebrated Thomas Hardy-who remains very much in print. Nevertheless, Henham/ Trevena also is surely a masterful English language novelist and a cultural figure of courage and vision, responding to...