Introduction to “Another Vision of Empire. Henry Rider Haggard’s Modernity and Legacy”

Listen! What is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the roads it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner. (Haggard King Solomon’s Mines 53) At the crossroads of Victorian and postcolonial studies..