The Highly Civilized Man; Richard Burton and the Victorian World

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005. Presumed First Paperback Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. Very good. [10], 354, [8] pages. Illustrations A Note on Sources. Notes. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads For Sigrid--With best wishes on your own adventures--Dane Kennedy. Dane Kennedy is Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University and author of Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939. Kennedy's Burton book, The Highly Civilized Man, was widely praised. Times Literary Supplement contributor Michael Saler found it a "wonderfully engaging and nuanced biography," as well as "the best biography of Burton as a man intimately involved with the central questions of his day, and of ours." Similar praise came from a Publishers Weekly reviewer who observed, "Kennedy succeeds in re-establishing Burton as a relevant figure for a 21st-century world grappling with issues of ethnic, cultural and sexual diversity." Likewise, Paul Laity, writing in the New Statesman, felt the book was a "thoughtful study," while New Criterion critic Eric Ormsby commended Kennedy for making it "plain how most of Burton's extraordinary activity was motivated less by passionate curiosity or scholarly fascination than by sheer cussedness." Ormsby further commented that Kennedy's "fascinating study is not a new biography, but an extended reflection on his subject's multiple, and protean, manifestations."

"I also remain very interested in the historiographical and methodological shifts that have taken place over the past few decades in our understanding of the nature and consequences of the imperial experience," Kennedy concluded in his CA interview. "With the heightened awareness that America currently holds a hegemonic position similar to that of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, these debates about the past are particularly relevant to the world we live in." Richard Burton was one of Victorian Britain's most protean figures. A soldier, explorer, ethnographer, and polyglot of rare power, as well as a poet, travel writer, and translator of the tales of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, Burton exercised his abundant talents in a diverse array of endeavors. Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Burton traveled so widely, wrote so prolifically, and contributed so forcefully to his generation's most contentious debates that heprovides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of the Victorians. One of the great challenges confronting the British in the nineteenth century was to make sense of the multiplicity of peoples and cultures they encountered in their imperial march around the globe. Burton played an important role in this mission. Drawing on his wide-ranging experiences in other lands and intense curiosity about their inhabitants, he conducted an intellectually ambitious, highly provocative inquiry into racial, religious, and sexual differences that exposed his own society's norms to scrutiny. Dane Kennedy offers a fresh and compelling examination of Burton and his contribution to the widening world of the Victorians. He advances the view that the Victorians' efforts to attach meaning to the differences they observed among other peoples had a profound influence on their own sense of self, destabilizing identities and reshaping consciousness. Engagingly written and vigorously argued, The Highly Civilized Man is an important contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a crucial era.