Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk

Refiguring Speech by Amy R.

Wong is a groundbreaking book that challenges traditional assumptions about speech and communication.

By examining late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong reveals the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous ideas about ownership and self-possession.

Through a series of innovative readings, she reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, emphasizing communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment.

This thought-provoking book offers a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication, making it an essential read for students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies.