Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere

This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and ‘new imperial history’ paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan ‘intercultures’, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders

Reading and Literary Appreciation in Colonial Singapore, 1820-1860

This chapter considers the complex relationship between reading, literary appreciation and civic participation in nineteenth-century Singapore. Its specific focus is on three very different types of reading by British audiences: recreational reading or reading for pleasure; reading for reference or knowledge; and reading and translating Malay manuscripts. Each of these types or practises of reading corresponds to a particular reading place: the first is the colonial subscription library – here the Singapore Library (established 1844) – which, I argue, was instrumental in selecting and promoting the kinds of habitus-forming literature deemed desirable for British colonists and, to some extent, for wealthy non-European elites; the second is the creation of reference, manuscript and archival libraries – here the Raffles Library and Museum (established 1874) and the library of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (SBRAS) (established 1877) – which transformed the kind of scholarly and scientific reading that was possible for British and other European readers in Singapore; and the third is the translation and evaluation of Malay literature by European readers in the ‘virtual’ reading spaces of the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (JIA) (1847–55; 1856–63) and the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JSBRAS) (1879–1922). While I concentrate on the racialised constructions of reading that emerged from within these British cultures of reading, I also briefly examine the alternative reading cultures that persisted and developed among local-born and diasporic Malay and Chinese communities, particularly those surrounding an emerging middle-class literati of teachers, scholars, translators, copyists, printers and publishers.European Commission Horizon 202

The ultimate romantic

Meeting Lord Byron in Athens in 1810, the 35-year-old Lady Hestor Stanhope, a well-known wit and traveller, was one of the few ladies (or gentlemen for that matter) not to fall under his spell. Byron’s effect on women was, by all accounts, extraordinary. Lady Rosebery almost fainted on meeting him; a demented Lady Caroline Lamb dressed up as a page boy in order to gain admission to his rooms and sent him a cutting of her pubic hair; and even his misused wife of only one year, Annabella Milbanke, was distressed by news of his death in 1824

Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia

Viewing Brexit as part of a longer history of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural ex-ceptionalism, this article reflects on what Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) can tell us about the utopian impulses informing Brexit’s neoimperialist ideology and hence about British identity politics today. Set in an inward-looking, socially homogeneous, and postindustrial society somewhere in the colonial southern hemisphere, Erewhon provides an anachronistic simulacrum of both an isolationist “Little England” and an imperial “Global Britain,” critiquing the idea of the self-sufficient, ethnonationalist “island nation” by demonstrating the extent to which it relies on the racial logic of White utopia-nism, as well as on a disavowal of the non-British labor that supports and sustains it.European Commission Horizon 202

Review of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's 'The Siege of Malta and Bizarro'

Visiting Sir Walter Scott at J. G. Lockhart’s house in London just before Scott’s final voyage to Malta and Italy in 1831, the Irish poet Thomas Moore reflected sadly in his journal on Scott’s series of debilitating strokes and was more than once ‘painfully struck by the utter vacancy of his look’. Moore claimed that the Lockharts’ ‘great object in sending [Scott] abroad’ was ‘to disengage his mind from the strong wish to write by which he is haunted—continually making efforts to produce something, without being able to bring his mind collectedly to bear upon it’. While the extent of Scott’s vacancy and lack of intellectual consistency is perhaps overstated here—indeed, he is described as being more receptive and convivial during two further visits by Moore—his final two incomplete works written in 1831–32 while convalescing abroad, The Siege of Malta and Bizarro, both bear the imprint of his illness and present a different set of challenges from those facing the editors of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels.2019-12-11 JG: additional articles removed from PD

Review of Robert White\u27s "Keats: A Literary Life"

There is little doubt that Keats studies have undergone an intense re-historicisation in the last two and a half decades. Critics from Jerome McGann to Nicholas Roe have shown us just how much was lost by focusing solely on author and genre-centred approaches to Keats‘s poetry, as well as uncovering the relevance of a surprising number of historical, social, and political contexts.2020-01-17 JG: Extraneous material removed from PD

Review of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott\u27s \u27Peveril of the Peak\u27

Peveril of the Peak has never been regarded as one of Walter Scott’s greatest novels and its relative failure to achieve critical success is often attributed to the ‘over-production and money-spinning’ that many see as characteristic of his writing in the 1820s. In the ‘Historical Note’ to the current edition, Alison Lumsden puts this judgement in context: while 1821–23 marked a period of phenomenal output for Scott, she emphasises the extent to which he was in command of his historical material, despite his denial of any attempt at strict historical veracity in the ‘Prefatory Letter’ to the work. Scott’s novels may have been written quickly and under commercial pressure, but their characters, themes, and contexts usually evolved more slowly over extended periods of time. As Lumsden points out, Scott had long been interested in the seventeenth century, and had already treated the Civil War in a Scottish context in Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), as well as coming across relevant material in his editions of Dryden (1808), Somers’ Tracts (1809–14), and Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count Grammont (1811). It was, or so it seems, only a matter of time before he turned his attention to the period in an English context.2019-12-22 JG: additional articles removed from PD

Word and Picture in Walter Scott

IN THE INTRODUCTORY NARRATIVE to The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), the sign-painter turned portrait-painter Dick Tinto accuses his friend Peter Pattieson, the fictional author of the novel, of overusing dialogue or, as Tinto more colloquially puts it, ‘the gob box’, as a means of representing character in his novels (BL, 21).1 Mounting a heated defence of the classical idea ut pictura poesis, Tinto dismisses Pattieson’s counter-argument that painting appeals to the eye whereas language addresses the ear, maintaining that words, ‘if properly employed’, have the ability to allow us to see or reconstruct images (BL, 22). Once widely endorsed, Tinto’s ‘picture theory’ of representation was increasingly disputed by eighteenth century British aestheticians.2 In Plastics (1712), Lord Shaftesbury rejects ut pictura poesis, considering comparisons between painting and poetry to be ‘constrained, lame, or defective’.3 Edmund Burke, too, claims in his Philosophic Enquiry (1757) that words, on the whole, do not generate images, drawing a distinction between painting’s imitative capacity to show objects in space and poetry’s figurative ability to designate them in time.

Queering the Imperial Romance: Settler Colonialism, Heteronormativity, and Interracial Intimacy in Sygurd Wiśniowski’s Tikera

Building on the idea of queer studies as a ‘subjectless’ critique that has no fixed political referent, this article considers the politics of interracial romance in Sygurd Wiśniowski’s novel Tikera or Children of the Queen of Oceania (Dzieci królowej Oceanii), first published in serial and codex form in Poland in 1877. It argues that the novel’s queering of British/Māori mixed-race bodies and Māori kinship structures is revealing of the biopolitics of modern sexuality: first, by showing how sexuality is entangled with discourses relating to ethnographic primitivity; second, by framing mixed-race and Indigenous peoples as queer populations marked for death; and third, by regulating and replacing Indigenous sexual and gender norms with the sexual modernity of European settler subjects, in particular, with western European understandings of heteronormative couplehood and privatised intimacy. Yet despite the eventual containment of Jenny/Tikera’s transgressive energies within the heteronormative reproductive structures of the nuclear family unit, the novel represents something of a test and a limit case for nineteenth-century novelistic genre conventions. Uneasily straddling the generic features of the imperial romance, the gawęda folk form, the tropes of Polish Romanticism, and the seriality of periodical fiction, the novel’s formal, representational, and ideological dissonance works to test the conventions of the imperial romance and the impulse towards salvage ethnography it tends to inscribe. In so doing, it replays the ongoing dialectic between realism and romance as part of a displaced relationship between coloniser and colonised, metropolitan and colonial fiction, and between British, American, and Polish novelistic conventions.European Commission Horizon 202

Culture, Counter-culture, and the Subversion of the Comic in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Theoretical interest in the relationship between literature and society is invested with particular purpose in the comic-parodic novel, as a form in which a recurrent oscillation of genres and narrative perspectives occurs only within a hierarchy where positioning is relational and perpetually contested, and where apparently "common" languages and values are revisisted throughout the course of the novel. The Middle Ages, as Umberto Eco reminds us, is a popular site of ironic revisitation for the comic-parodic novelist, providing the opportunity to "speculate about our infancy, of course but also about the illusion of our senility." As Eco goes on to point out, however, writers such as Ariosto and Cervantes do not revisit the Middle Ages as antiquarians but rather as purveyors of a period already refashioned by the romance tradition. To this company he might have added Mark Twain, who has been described by more than one critic as the "American Cervantres." The sixth century Middle Ages to which Twain sends Hank Morgan, his nineteenth-century middle class American hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, is in fact the fictive Middle Ages of Malory - the "highly unreal and literary world of the idealistic, anachronistic romance" (Kordecki 338), itself a fifteenth-centure revisitation of the "real" sixth century.Remove first page from file - A