The transatlantic Thames: Anglo-American tensions on the Victorian “stream of pleasure”

While it is widely understood that rivers took on new symbolic power as avatars of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, less examined is their use as a space for Transatlantic cultural flow, and transnational commentary and critique. This article explores the ways in which a variety of Americans abroad in this period centred the Thames – newly charged with nationalist sentiment – in their accounts of Britain. In particular, it analyses Elizabeth Robins and Joseph Pennell’s travel narrative The Stream of Pleasure, first published as the lead article in the ‘Midsummer Holiday Issue’ of The Century Magazine in 1889, as an exemplary text in which both artist and writer play with the image of the river in ways that chime with much wider Transatlantic debates at this moment

Valorisation of Biowastes for the Production of Green Materials Using Chemical Methods

With crude oil reserves dwindling, the hunt for a sustainable alternative feedstock for fuels and materials for our society continues to expand. The biorefinery concept has enjoyed both a surge in popularity and also vocal opposition to the idea of diverting food-grade land and crops for this purpose. The idea of using the inevitable wastes arising from biomass processing, particularly farming and food production, is, therefore, gaining more attention as the feedstock for the biorefinery. For the three main components of biomass—carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins—there are long-established processes for using some of these by-products. However, the recent advances in chemical technologies are expanding both the feedstocks available for processing and the products that be obtained. Herein, this review presents some of the more recent developments in processing these molecules for green materials, as well as case studies that bring these technologies and materials together into final products for applied usage