The Victorian encounter with Africa contains many micro-narratives that call for a questioning of an old consensus. Tentative assumptions as to the motives of early missionaries and colonial personnel often prove less than satisfactory due to stereotypes and unexplored archives. The need for new master narratives that move beyond the old paradigms of Western expansion and African victimization are being called for by scholars of the Global North and South--narratives that allow room for strong evidence of an egalitarian joint endeavor and African cultural vitality without avoiding the investment in imperialism practiced by colonial personnel. Based on extensive archival research, Walking the Rift advocates an alternative proposal--missionaries and administrators caught in the grinding of contradictory opposites. As a professional artist, Alfred Robert Tucker captured this tug-of-war on canvas, but similar dichotomies are found in his approach to marriage contracts, slavery, mission and church organizational structure, alliance with the colonial government and African partnership. Tucker is a representative figure--a prism to shine light on those involved in the British East African project. Like many in the early encounter with Africa, he was neither a consistent imperialist nor a complete egalitarian idealist, but operated in both spheres without creating a third.

Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself wehen the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.