THE NYANGWE DIARY OF DAVID LIVINGSTONE: RESTORING THE TEXT

This project will build on imaging technology pioneered with medieval parchment palimpsests to create a digital image archive and online scholarly edition of the Nyangwe field diary (1871) of the celebrated Victorian explorer David Livingstone. Although in a fragile, nearly illegible state, the paper diary is of immense historical value because it details the circumstances leading up to Livingstone's famous meeting with Henry Stanley in November 1871, and because it records Livingstone's response to a massacre of the local African population by Arab slave traders' an event that would become a rallying point for late-Victorian abolitionists. Our project will seek to develop technology for the preservation of the diary and recovery of its faded text, and create a model for scholar-scientist collaboration. Our work will make Livingstone's diary accessible to scholars and non-specialists worldwide and produce a template for the display of similar records of Victorian travel and exploration

Reflections on the Victorian(ist) Impulse to Totalize Africa

IN this essay, I offer some reflections on how Victorianists might understand nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discursive practices for mapping Africa. In doing this, I respond to what Sukanya Banerjee, our panel organizer, asked us to do in determining the focus for our essays—namely, that we direct “attention to topics in Victorian studies that [we] feel might otherwise be overlooked or viewed differently.” In what follows I introduce and problematize a series of Victorian-era maps or, more specifically, problematize what such maps represent conceptually, then offer some alternate means by which Victorianists might critically engage with cultural and social reality on the nineteenthcentury African continent, particularly the more southern and eastern parts of the continent where much of my prior research has focused. Figure 1, a meme taken from my book Fieldwork of Empire (2019), speaks to common perceptions of how Victorians tended to represent the African continent, that the continent alternates between being “blank” and being “dark” in Victorian imperial discourse. The meme also engages with chronology by nodding to the idea that Africa, during the Victorian era, evolved in such discourse from being the former to being the latter. Other nineteenth-century representations of Africa show that “blank” during the era often meant that cartographers could only include a limited range of geographical features (e.g., Burton et al., inset map). By contrast, later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Victorian maps of the continent represent the continent in a way that reflects the European partition of the continent and shows different European colonial possessions clearly marked by hard borders (e.g., Hertslet et al.; see fig. 2). Collectively, these latter two types of maps—the limited geographical map and the colonial border map—provide actual era-specific instances of the representations to which my meme speaks. The maps also hint at the means by which local cultural and geographical knowledge—the basis of other earlier maps of Africa—came to be replaced by European knowledge in later maps

A Trove of New Works by Thomas Pynchon? \u3ci\u3eBomarc Service News\u3c/i\u3e Rediscovered

Early in 1960, after having graduated from Cornell and while writing V., Thomas Pynchon moved to Seattle and began working for the Boeing Airplane Company. What Pynchon did while working at Boeing has puzzled scholars almost from the moment of the very private author\u27s literary debut. When we try to delve into his stint at Boeing first mentioned by Lewis Nichols and Dick Schaap--we reach dead ends or find conflicting information. Yet Pynchon\u27s time at Boeing is perhaps the most documented period of his life, and over the years a number of interesting (though not always accurate) bits of information have emerged. Here I first recount the previous scholarship on this phase of Pynchon\u27s career and consider its weaknesses. Next, I detail my own research and conclusions, namely that while at Boeing, Pynchon wrote primarily for an internal newsletter--none of whose articles have bylines --called Bomarc Service News (first mentioned by Richard Lane), and that in two and a half years of work he produced some twenty-five to thirty technical articles for this newsletter. I discuss these articles and the criteria for attributing their authorship, and finish with a comprehensive annotated list of those I attribute to Pynchon. In this way, I hope to solve what has been one of the longest-running mysteries in Pynchon scholarship, as well as bring to light the depth and range of Pynchon\u27s expertise on the Bomarc missile--an expertise which almost certainly inspired and underlies Gravity\u27s Rainbow

Transimperial Networks and East Asia: Timeline

To help instructors and students who may be unfamiliar with the history of East Asia and its transimperial exchanges with the Anglophone world, the creators of the “Transimperial Networks and East Asia” lesson plan cluster built this timeline, which includes some major historical events from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. This timeline comes out of our many discussions about the methodological issues that arise when the field of Victorian Studies seeks to expand its traditional geographical scope. As we quickly realized in the process of creating our cluster, the usual boundaries of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution to World War I) are too limited and Eurocentric for the transimperial connections our lesson plans examine. Thus, we offer this timeline both to orient instructors and students and to illustrate how centering East Asia calls into question our field’s most basic assumptions

The End of Resolution? Reflections on the Ethics of Closure in Don DeLillo's Detective Plots

This discussion of Don DeLillo's novels Libra and Mao II examines the ethical implications of DeLillo’s refusal to provide narrative closures in his use of and critical engagement with Victorian detective novels and their closural patterns

Book Review of Dane Kennedy, \u3ci\u3eThe Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia\u3c/i\u3e

Mid-nineteenth-century British exploration, particularly the stories of the “heroic” individuals who carried out this exploration, remains a topic of worldwide interest, as most recently evidenced by the many events in Britain and Africa celebrating the 2013 bicentenary of David Livingstone’s birth. Dane Kennedy’s intriguing study takes issue with such readings of the historical record by foregrounding an epistemological tension that lies at the heart of nineteenthcentury British exploration discourse and practice. The book examines the collision—as it played out in the exploration of African and Australia—between metropolitan scientific protocols and non-Western quotidian realities. Nineteenth-century explorers, argues Kennedy, left home with complex, institutionally determined objectives, but once abroad they found their goals impeded by local and regional circumstances and came face-to-face with their own helplessness in non-Western contexts. In fact, the methods of nineteenth-century exploration resulted in extended encounters with indigenous populations and compelled the explorers to rely on intermediaries, to use local information in producing scientific data, and to support the agendas of gateway states such as Zanzibar, Tripoli, and Egypt—practices that all ran at odds with metropolitan expectations. The experiences of explorers in the field became the basis, ultimately, of an alienating knowledge that had to be withheld from accounts published in theWest, lest the explorers fail to gain the validation and celebrity status that so many of them craved. Kennedy explains: “It was a hard-won knowledge, the product of dislocation, danger, and desire. It was an intimate knowledge, derived from long periods of contact with other people. It was perforce a secret knowledge, incommunicable to countrymen back home” (262)

Conspiracy, revolution, and terrorism from Victorian fiction to the modern novel

Book synopsis: Drawing on critical and theoretical work by Miller, Boone, Foucault, Jameson, and others, as well as cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian "conspiracy narrative tradition"--a tradition which embraces classic Victorian works like Bleak House, Great Expectations, Villette, and The Moonstone, as well as later Victorian and Edwardian novels by James, Conrad, and Chesterton, and early spy thrillers such as The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps. In reading these works as instances of a single literary tradition, the conspiracy narrative tradition, the author traces how the representation of conspiracy changes in nineteenth-century British literature and argues that many of these changes occur in response to significant Victorian-era developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848-49, the rise of British law enforcement agencies, the growth of Irish Fenian terrorism, and the fin-de-siècle waning of the British Empire. The book also explores the roles that conspiratorial indeterminacy and irony play in shaping the Victorian conspiracy narrative tradition and examines how modern works by Proust, Kafka, and Pynchon appropriate elements from Victorian conspiracy narratives. Finally, in using recent work on affect theory as well as studies of paranoia by Freud, Shapiro, and Meissner, the book traces how Victorian works fashion the paranoid subject, a discursive process that ultimately leads to the emergence of the modern fictional conspiracy theorist