Propaganda discourse in an imperial setting : The case of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria

Between 1870 and 1945 imperial regimes expanded, causing a redefinition in the territory of their empires; this reconfiguration of geo-political as well as cultural space was supported by the production of texts, which contributed to the dissemination of the main tenets of colonial ideology. England was at the centre of modern imperial history as it established a specific space policy that was based on the dichotomy ‘home/far from’ which emphasised the relationship between metropolis, a dynamic centre of innovation, and colony, the receiver of the benefits of ‘civilisation’, and was based on racial difference (Ballantyne – Burton 2012).This paper deals with propaganda discourse by focussing on the case of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria (1921). Despite Strachey’s distance from extreme militarism and hero-worship of the Victorian era, this successful text contributed to the construction of the British Empire cultural formation. The paper will adopt a corpus assisted analysis to illustrate how specific keywords and expressions in Strachey’s work relate to the British imperial propaganda discourse based on white superiority. Lastly, it will also focus on how Strachey’s depiction of Victoria’s changing political status from Princess to Empress of India can be inserted into the larger framework of imperial propaganda discourse.