King Solomon's Mines (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

"Scholars, students and general readers will welcome Gerald Monsman's new edition, which comes lavishly supplied with illuminating contextual documents. In a provocative introductory essay, Professor Monsman describes the mythopoeic ambition of King Solomon's Mines by recovering its intellectual context in Victorian anthropology. Haggard sought to create an Africa of the imagination, more precious for the access it gave modern readers to their alienated psychic origins than for its material resources. Readers of this excellent new edition will find that the fictions of imperialism were richer and stranger than they had thought." - Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley

When first published, King Solomon's Mines (1885) was an enormous popular success. The narrative follows the explorations of Allan Quatermain, a fortune hunter who travels to Africa in search of ancient treasures and a lost fellow explorer. Written as an adventure story, the novel is also a late-Victorian imperial romance that illuminates the politics of British imperialist capitalism in 1870s and 1880s South Africa.This edition includes contemporary reviews, other writings by Haggard on Africa and romance, and documents focusing on imperialism and diamond mining in late nineteenth-century South Africa.