bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Libraries
Authors: Gettelman Debra
Published: June 2017

As the price of books placed them largely out of the reach of most Victorian readers, a rapidly developing and diverse system of libraries increasingly flourished in nineteenth‐century Britain as a portal to the growing world of print. Whether the term “library” is used to refer to a commercial lending enterprise like Mudie's Select Library, to the libraries attached to local literary societies or workers’ institutes, to the free public libraries initiated in this period, to a national institution like the British Museum, or to a domestic space within the middle‐ or upper‐class home, libraries were the subject of surprisingly keen debate and social‐class tension in the Victorian era. They at once made possible the individualistic discovery of new worlds and new identities through reading and, by regulating what books could be read, participated in the transmission of collective, largely middle‐class values.
Machen, Arthur
Authors: Ferguson Christine
Published: June 2017

Welsh writer Arthur Machen shot to prominence in the 1890s through the pagan‐themed gothic tales – including
The Great God Pan
(1894) and
The Three Imposters
(1895) – that helped to lay the foundation of the weird fiction genre. He was also a journalist, literary critic, biographer, and mythographer whose nongothic fiction, for example his magisterial
Künstlerroman The Hill of Dreams
(1907), drew inspiration from Celtic Christianity, anthropology, occultism, British folklore, and the Welsh countryside. Machen's career was rejuvenated during World War I through his famous Angels of Mons story, “The Bowmen” (1914), and retained its mythopoeic direction through his repeated literary revisitations of the Grail legend.
Marryat, Florence
Authors: Kontou Tatiana
Published: June 2017

Florence Marryat (1833–99) was a prolific author, editor of
London Society
, actress, playwright, orator, operatic singer, and spiritualist. Marryat was a modern Victorian, aware of the performativity of women's cultural positions, who shaped her public image through a variety of filial and professional roles.
Mesmerism
Authors: Galvan Jill
Published: June 2017

Mesmerism – or animal magnetism, as it was called early on – arose when the late eighteenth‐century physician Franz Anton Mesmer developed a therapeutic method of using magnetic forces to balance a universal fluid within the human body. Later practitioners emphasized the trance that Mesmer's method seemed to bring about, along with the mesmerist's power over his subject's will. In the 1840s James Braid's fascination with this seemingly “somnambulic” state of trance led him to coin the term
hypnotism
(from the ancient Greek word for sleep). While some regarded mesmerism/hypnotism as legitimate medicine, others saw it as an occult or spiritual practice. It helped to lay the groundwork for modern spiritualism and was of great interest to late nineteenth‐century psychical researchers investigating paranormal phenomena. Intriguing to the Victorian public at large as well as to numerous literary authors, ideas of mesmeric influence informed and were informed by popular visions of gender, racial, and other social relations.
Money and business
Authors: Henry Nancy
Published: June 2017

Realist fiction from the novels of Daniel Defoe onward is focused on money. Victorian novels in particular tracked economic developments in the domestic, national, and global spheres. The respectable business and the sensible investing that characterized Victorian society were punctuated in novels by sensational speculating and economic crashes, which offered opportunities for explicit or implicit moralizing. An expansive, globalized financial market created the conditions in which new forms of psychology might be explored. Compulsive gambling was an extension of this mentality; and novelists treated this modern condition, as it influenced all segments of British society.
Neo‐Victorianism
Authors: Tomaiuolo Saverio
Published: June 2017

Neo‐Victorianism is a much‐debated term, which identifies literary works (as well as cultural artifacts) that explicitly address, recover, evoke, or are set during the Victorian age. Some of the distinguishing features of this artistic modality present “new” and challenging approaches to the history, the collective figurations, and the works produced during the Victorian era. Based upon a more or less explicit rewriting of the nineteenth‐century canon, neo‐Victorian texts are sometimes problematically balanced between eulogy and parody, imitation and contestation. With specific reference to novels (which represent the most prominent expression of neo‐Victorianism), it does not suffice to have a nineteenth‐century background to be reputed as a neo‐Victorian fiction, since the underlying principle of this literary genre lies in a different and a divergent (re)discovery of the past. Key contributors to the neo‐Victorian novel include A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Michel Faber, John Fowles, Jean Rhys, and Sarah Waters.
Novel, Newgate
Authors: Rosenthal Jesse
Published: June 2017

In the 1830s, novels of crime and criminals, called “Newgate novels,” became both popular and controversial. These books, chiefly by Edward Bulwer‐Lytton, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Charles Dickens, led to debate about the representation of crime in literature. While the criticism of these novels is tied to literary politics of their day, the controversy surrounding them points to developing Victorian ideas on the right and wrong ways to read and write fiction.
Periodicals
Authors: Buurma Rachel Sagner
Published: June 2017

Some of the most important and enduring literature written during the Victorian period first appeared in the pages of the quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily magazines, journals, and newspapers that proliferated over the course of the nineteenth century. During the 1850s and over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the removal of the taxes on knowledge, cheaper paper, new publication technologies, and widening readerships lead to an explosion of titles. Expanding readerships were met by increasingly specialized and genre‐specific periodical publications, though the idea of the generalist periodical and the vision of a common English‐speaking cultural life it embodied remained in play throughout the century. Published in the pages of periodicals, poetry, novels, dialogues, and nonfiction in prose both shaped and were shaped by the Victorian cultural imagination. Periodicals were the dominant print cultural medium of the nineteenth century, and the range of temporal rhythms and publishing norms they installed took long roots and expanded into Victorian social and cultural life.
Procter, Adelaide Anne
Authors: Larsen Hoeckley Cheri L.
Published: June 2017

Adelaide Anne Procter was a popular mid‐Victorian poet as well as a women's rights activist and a Catholic philanthropist. As her poem “The Evenings in a Life” demonstrates, even her traditionally domestic or sentimental poetry reveals her commitments to economic and political justice, particularly for women.
Reading
Authors: Flint Kate
Published: June 2017

This entry looks first at the history and sociology of reading, which may broadly be defined as an interest in the intersection of specific readers with specific texts. Such an approach looks for concrete evidence about who obtained what books and how; where and when people read them; what their responses may have been – and what general attitudes about reading were in circulation in the period. Second, a range of general theoretical approaches concerning reading is examined, including notions of ideal readers, embedded readers, reader‐response theory, and resisting readers. Third, this entry considers the representation of reading in literary texts, painting, and other forms of visual art. Finally, it looks at reading, physiology, and affect, exploring how theories of mind and body worked together in the nineteenth century to explain how people read; how this related to such issues as attention and day‐dreaming; connections with today's cognitive neuroscience, and the different ways in which reading, environment, emotions, and feelings are intertwined.
Griffith, George
Authors: Ramirez Luz Elena
Published: June 2017

George Griffith (1857–1906) worked variously as a schoolmaster, travel correspondent, and serialized novelist. He authored over forty books of travel writing, history, romance adventure, and speculative fiction, and his inspirations cut across cultures and disciplines to include Camille Flammarion, William Prescott, Charles Darwin, and Jules Verne. Notable works are
Around the World in 65 Days
,
Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru
, the fantasy adventure
Romance of Golden Star
,
Angel of the Revolution
, and
A Honeymoon in Space
. Taken together, the Griffith corpus reveals a historical enthusiasm about stories of conquest and the fate of empires, an avid curiosity about technologies of travel and war, and a fascination with the themes of evolution and degeneration. His work is indispensable to fin‐de‐siècle literary studies for the snapshot it presents of the historical past, the inquiries and explorations of this period, and the intriguing ways of being it imagines in the future.
Riddell, Charlotte
Authors: Colella Silvana
Published: June 2017

The Irish‐born Charlotte Riddell became famous in the 1860s and 1870s as the novelist of the City of London. She was a keen interpreter of the business world and an active participant in the ideological and cultural construction of financial modernity. Her output was copious; she produced novels of the City such asToo Much Alone,George GeithandAustin Friars, domestic tales, novels of Irish life, and numerous ghost stories. Riddell's reputation declined rapidly soon after her death, but in recent years renewed scholarly attention has been devoted to her work.
Ritchie, Anne Isabella Thackeray
Authors: Mourão Manuela
Published: June 2017

Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837–1919) was a prolific writer of novels, short fiction, essays, and letters who lived all her life among the great names of British literature, as daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray and step‐aunt of Virginia Woolf. Her life and work spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. She witnessed the progression from Victorian tradition to modernism, and her work provides an important link between the two ages. Understudied until late in the twentieth century, Ritchie's work has steadily been gaining sustained critical attention.
Romanticism
Authors: Faflak Joel
Published: June 2017

The traditional divide between the Victorian and the Romantic periods appears less distinct once we examine the influence and transference between Romantic and Victorian writers and their texts. The Victorian reception of Romantic literature, for its unavoidable literary and cultural response to history – specifically, one determined by the epochal events surrounding 1789 – is at once an attempt further to clarify the Romantic achievement and a phenomenon crucial to Victorian literature's self‐definition. This struggle inevitably determined subsequent critical receptions of Romantic literature, but it needs to be examined on its own terms.
Servants in literature
Authors: Fernandez Jean
Published: June 2017

Social, cultural, and intellectual factors account for Victorian literature's interest in domestic workers. Servants as members of the largest occupational category in Victorian England impacted domestic culture, turning the home into a space where class relations and class identities were performed and negotiated. Thinkers such as Darwin and Hegel contributed to anxieties over servants as class enemies, who were nonetheless necessitous for a master's survival and subjectivity. Victorian servants as vexatious figures are subjects of canonical literature, of nonfiction, and of their own autobiographical acts, satire, and poetry. Early scholarship viewed servants as minor characters with formal functions; later, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and deconstructionist approaches politicized the servant as a marginal figure. More recent studies read literary texts as participating in dominant cultural discourses on servants as a class, while also focusing on servants as producers of working‐class literature.
Sonnet
Authors: Remoortel Marianne Van
Published: June 2017

The sonnet was one of the most popular poetic forms of the Victorian period. Drawing on the sonnet tradition established by Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, Victorian sonnets and sonnet sequences such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Sonnets from the Portuguese
, George Meredith's
Modern Love
, Christina Rossetti's
Monna Innominata
, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
The House of Life
explored a wide variety of issues, including themes of love, life, religion, and death.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Authors: Colley Ann C.
Published: June 2017

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) was a literary celebrity during his lifetime. Although widely recognized for adventure stories, such as
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
, as well as for his novella
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and his collection of poems
A Child's Garden of Verses
, he produced a large body of work which included numerous essays, poems, short stories, histories, as well a number of novels and a collection of remarkable letters. Stevenson's writing reflects his nomadic life that took him from his birthplace in Scotland to England, Europe, America, and eventually to the South Seas. It was in the South Seas that he wrote his remarkable Pacific fiction and also composed his semi‐anthropological study,
In the South Seas
. After his death, Stevenson's reputation noticeably declined so that from around 1914 until 1990 he was thought a second‐rate writer who only wrote boys’ adventure fiction, but in the last fifty years critics have paid increasingly serious and sophisticated attention to all aspects of his work. Stevenson is now reinstated in the “canon” and is among the twenty‐six most translated authors in the world.
Sympathy
Authors: Greiner Rae
Published: June 2017

While sympathy enjoys a strong association with Victorian literature and morality, understandings of sympathy varied, as debates were carried out by philosophers, artists, and scientists about its origins and workings. Theorized with new scientific precision by eighteenth‐century moral philosophers and social and political theorists such as David Hume and Adam Smith, sympathy in the nineteenth century was complex and implicated in a number of moral, imaginative, cognitive, and behavioral processes, including the capacity for sharing another person's feelings and ideas, the ability to picture oneself as one is seen by others, and an altruistic yet unconscious instinct, born of natural selection, to preserve the other members of one's own species or community. Along with a sense of sympathy as entailing a capacity for emotional copying were arguments for and against its source as a God‐given attribute, a faculty honed by experience, or an inborn product of nature. Victorian literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific writings reflect the variations of meaning attributed to this rich and dynamic concept.
Romance
Authors: Donghaile Deaglán Ó
Published: June 2017

The romance was an aesthetically productive fusion of genres that made its tales very pleasing to very many of the readers whose spare change fueled the publishing booms of the Victorian period. It has traditionally been interpreted as a mode that popularized the conservatism and expansionism that characterized British cultural politics during the nineteenth century. However, romance was also manipulated by anti‐imperialist and socialist writers, who used it to offer alternative narratives and to criticize colonial practice and capitalist ideology in a number of genres that had very immediate resonances for contemporary readers.
Technology and time
Authors: Henchman Anna
Published: June 2017

The nineteenth century saw dramatic and contradictory shifts in the measurement and conception of time. The sun was still the imprecise master clock in 1800, but by 1900 time had become primarily a manmade phenomenon that needed to be produced, managed, and distributed through an increasingly complex set of networked systems. Trains, telegraphs, and other transportation and communications systems made standardization necessary and led to a new awareness of the multiplicity of times that had earlier existed without causing significant difficulties in everyday life. With these technologies came a growing sense of the interconnectedness of different people and places. Yet attempting to control time could be fruitless and frustrating, whether in travel, engineering, or science, as constant difficulties with measurement arose that, in many cases, would not be resolved until the twentieth century.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
Authors: Pearsall Cornelia
Published: June 2017

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), widely considered the leading poet of the Victorian period, intersects with virtually every major issue that occupied Victorian society: imperialism, war, politics, science, religion, industrialization, marriage, desire, sexuality, education, gender relations – just to name a few dominant categories in the period and in his poetry. Created Poet Laureate in 1850 and elevated to a baronetcy in 1883, Tennyson occupied a distinctive public position even as his poetry perhaps best represented its era when at its most intensively personal. Despite the cultural or personal relevance of much of his verse, the abiding appreciation of Tennyson for many Victorian readers was based in the sound of his poetry, its profound technical mastery of metrics, cadence, and rhythm. He produced major works in traditional poetic genres, including lyric, epic, and ballad, and is credited with innovating the Victorian dramatic monologue. Taking a place in the British literary tradition alongside Milton and Wordsworth, his poetry exerted an international influence, in no small measure due to Britain's aggressive imperial expansion in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the period of his greatest stature.
Translation
Authors: Drury Annmarie S.
Published: June 2017

Victorian translation had complex affiliations: with British imperialist activity, with the burgeoning periodical press, and with development of the writerly profession, especially for women of letters. Comparative study – of cultures, of texts, of forms, and of poetic meters – informed the practice of translators, who used a diversity of methods to bring texts into English. Translators including Edward FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Francis Newman, and Max Müller reflected on their practices in discussions that are of interest to scholars of translation studies.
Utopia and dystopia
Authors: Wegner Phillip E.
Published: June 2017

Given the genre of utopia's English provenance, it comes as no surprise that prominent examples appear in the Victorian period. The phenomenal global success of the US author Edward Bellamy'sLooking Backward, 2000–1887ignited a tremendous outpouring of utopia fiction, the most celebrated of these being William Morris'sNews from Nowhere. The late Victorian period also saw the emergence of a rich strand of feminist utopia fiction. At the same time, a number of other popular Victorian subgenres, including post‐apocalyptic fictions and future war narratives, offer darker visions of the future. These negative visions would play a crucial role in the development of the most successful subgenre of the twentieth‐century British novel, the dystopia, a tradition inaugurated by H. G. Wells.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry (Mary Augusta Ward)
Authors: Malone Katherine
Published: June 2017

Mary Augusta Arnold Ward (1851–1920) was a prolific novelist, critic, and political activist. Granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and niece to the poet Matthew Arnold, Ward belonged to one of the most prominent intellectual families of the Victorian era. She is best known for her novelRobert Elsmere(1888), by some reports the bestselling novel of the century. In more than twenty novels and numerous periodical essays, Ward addresses weighty subjects such as the crisis of faith and doubt, the rise of democracy, and the woman question. Frequently described by reviewers as the literary heir to George Eliot because of her treatment of serious philosophical and social issues, Ward's reputation waned in the early twentieth century due to her anti‐suffrage campaign and the changing aesthetics of literary modernism. Recent scholarship has renewed interest in her complex use of feminism and her representations of England's transition period.
Wells, Herbert George
Authors: Morgan Monique
Published: June 2017

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) became famous in the late nineteenth century as the author of a string of successful “scientific romances” which were to become foundational works of science fiction. Prior to his publishing success, he had formally studied science and had worked as a teacher. In the twentieth century he achieved international renown as an author of realist fiction and nonfiction prose, and as a public intellectual who advocated socialism, sexual freedom, one world state, and political leadership by scientists and intellectuals. Most recent scholarship has focused on his early scientific romances, though several important studies have traced unifying features across Wells's varied and lengthy literary career.
Wordsworth, William
Authors: Mason Emma
Published: June 2017

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was perhaps the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, his influence on Victorian readers and writers alike unrivaled in the period. His poetry, which championed benevolence and emotional response as well as intellectual attentiveness, shaped the Victorians’ reception of religion and spirituality, science, education and philosophy, and humanitarian welfare and social reform. From his relationships with Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Felicia Hemans and George and Margaret Beaumont, Wordsworth was a writer of community, as well as of nature, subjects that dovetail for him in his constant focus on the poor and socially outcast.
Mangan, James Clarence
Authors: Campbell Matthew
Published: June 2017

James Clarence Mangan (1803–49) was an Irish poet, fiction writer, translator, and journalist. He lived in obscurity in Dublin for all of his life, and a large part of his writing was published pseudonymously. Initially published in conservative and unionist journals, he was to publish powerful translations and original poems in
The Nation
in the 1840s. He died toward the end of the Irish famine, a subject that powerfully touches his later writings.
Food, Anthropology of
Authors: Waldstein Anna
Published: June 2017

The anthropology of food addresses fundamental questions about humanity. Food has been instrumental in human evolution and the development of culture and society, yet the ways people classify food and distinguish it from medicinal, poisonous, and other ingested materials varies widely. The overlap between food and mind‐altering substances reveals the crucial role that “drug‐foods” played in the development of colonialism and globalization. Consuming various foods may represent shared identities, political divisions, health imperatives, and spiritual duties, or lack thereof. Malnourishment and other disordered eating patterns are manifestations of the imbalances in global food production and distribution systems. With growing skepticism about corporate, biotechnological approaches to food crises, permaculture and other grassroots initiatives offer promise for the future.
Missionaries and Anthropology
Authors: Zehner Edwin
Published: June 2017

The relationships between missionaries and anthropology have often been fraught with tensions. However, the nature of those tensions has changed over the years. Recently there has been an increased anthropological interest in the study of missions, a development that corresponds with the growth of interest in postcolonial studies and in global Christianities. The early parts of this entry focus primarily on relations between anthropology and Protestant missionaries, while later parts also consider missions of other religions, especially Islam.
Representation, Politics of
Authors: Vargas‐Cetina Gabriela
Published: June 2017

Anthropologists have represented others mainly through written ethnography and oral presentations that include photographs, and today ethnography often includes sounds, videos, and film. In the process of representing what they do and the people and places at their fieldwork sites, anthropologists also build a representation of themselves. Starting in the 1970s, anthropologists began to see these representations as resulting from highly politicized environments, both in the field and in academia, and also as products imbued with personal politics. Now anthropologists consider that structural inequalities and political negotiations are intrinsic in all forms of ethnography and the presentations and performances deriving from it. Even when description seems objective and detached, it is inherently political. Furthermore, the personal relations anthropologists develop during their research activities may result in friendships and political activities merging the lives of ethnographers with the lives of local peoples at their field sites.
Amado, Jorge
Authors: Norton Wil
Published: June 2017

This entry traces Jorge Amado's aesthetic developments in his novel‐writing. Amado's early novels show an intense focus on socialist realism, and he used the novel form to critique Brazil's treatment of the lower classes. By the 1950s, however, he reinvented his style, recounting more picaresque, humorously ironic portrayals of the ambiguities and inconsistencies in Brazilian society. In tracing Amado's literary history, this entry mentions his involvement in Brazilian leftist politics and his exile in South America and Europe, important events in his development as a novelist.
Architecture and Urban Studies in South and Southeast Asia
Authors: Pieris Anoma
Published: June 2017

Urban and architectural spaces that bear the imprint of colonialism were subjects of contestation and resistance throughout the late twentieth century, provoking the renaming of cities, the shift of capitols, and a difficult politics of heritage conservation. Proponents of varied nationalist ideologies have sought to overwrite their material traces with compelling mythologies of place origins and cultural meaning. The politics of development has penetrated these environments via urban reconstruction and post‐disaster relief efforts, while the lingering imagination of a colonial past feeds networks of global consumption through tourism. Postcolonial contestations over space and place as studied through the disciplines of architecture and urbanism highlight key issues that have preoccupied scholars of South and Southeast Asia. New interdisciplinary interpretations of these categories expose the postcolonial politics of an era of nation‐building that preceded economic liberalization. They draw thematically on spatial contestations over postcolonial geographies, indigenous modernities, postcolonial space(s), modernization, globalization, and heritage environments.
Asian Tigers: Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea
Authors: Watson Jini Kim
Published: June 2017

Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea are often grouped under the label of “Asian Tigers” or “Asian Miracle Economies.” Following World War II, they developed successful manufacturing and export industries and have been touted as models of Third World industrial development. Yet their economic rise has obscured the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of the “Asian miracle.” When viewed through the lens of postcolonial studies, the Asian Tigers’ rapid economic development can be seen to be deeply entwined with Cold War politics of decolonization, US imperialism in Asia, and complex attempts to forge postcolonial national identities. In particular, literature and cultural production provides a broader perspective on the economic rise of the Asian Tigers.
Atwood, Margaret
Authors: Singh Ravindra Pratap
Published: June 2017

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (b. 1939) is a Canadian author, novelist, poet, and cultural activist. Atwood's works have been internationally recognized by more than 55 awards, including two Governor General's Award: in 1966 forCircle Gameand in 1985 forHandmaid's Tale. In 2000, she won the Booker Prize forBlind Assassin. Atwood is an acclaimed feminist, as well as an advocate for young emerging writers. In many of her novels, she creates a woman protagonist who reflects the personae of “every women,” victimized by the bludgeons of gender and politics and struggling with different types of inequalities. The civil rights movement also had a major impact on Atwood, and she became involved in Amnesty International. These leanings are reflected in her collection of poetryTrue Stories(1981) and the novelBodily Harm(1981).
Barbarism
Authors: Baker Peter
Published: June 2017

Broadly speaking, one can claim that the term “barbarism” represents a rhetorical figure, which is functional to the historicism that is particular to the culturally hegemonic power blocs within Latin America as they shift throughout time. This entry offers an overview of the dominant trends, tracing the various roles that the discourse on barbarism played in the material practices of power in postcolonial Iberian America, and, in doing so, bringing forth rather than concealing the complexity of the term and its implications for the consideration of postcolonial Latin American historiography and critical theory.
Barnet, Miguel
Authors: Nance Kimberly
Published: June 2017

Miguel Barnet (b. January 28, 1940 in Havana) is widely credited with initiating the Latin American literary genre known astestimonio. Barnet's most significant work is undoubtedly his testimonial novels, and in particularBiografía de un cimarrón(1966), based on a series of interviews with 103‐year‐old Esteban Montejo. Coining the termsgestorandgestanteto describe the relationship between the professional writer and the interviewee, Barnet insisted that aesthetic intervention was not only a pragmatic necessity, it was also the writer's professional responsibility in what amounted to a joint political project.
British Empire
Authors: Watson Tim
Published: June 2017

The British Empire governed a heterogeneous group of peoples and territories through a fundamental reliance on military and economic power. Scholars now stress the incompleteness of British sovereignty and the importance of local populations and elites, collaborating with or resisting British rule. Nevertheless, British power incontrovertibly transformed the world in the modern period. From the conquest of Ireland and the establishment of a British state, to the rise of the slavery‐dependent settlements in the Americas, to the rule of India and large swaths of Africa and the Middle East, to the violent attempt to crush opposition to that rule in South Asia, Malaysia, and Kenya, the British Empire was a major force in world history. Imperial scholarship began with stories of governors, moving to the broader “Cambridge school” of imperial historians, then to ideas of “imperialism of free trade” and “gentlemanly capitalism.” Recently, subaltern historians have looked at peasant and tribal communities neglected by imperial and nationalist histories, and postcolonial scholars have analyzed the cultural processes crucial to imperial ideology and power.
Caliban
Authors: Brighenti Maura
Published: June 2017

At the beginning of the 1960s, Roberto Fernández Retamar took possession of Caliban – a figure created by Shakespeare in 1611 – in order to make him the symbol of the culture and history of
nuestra America mestiza
. Since then, the Caliban figure has often made an appearance in Latin American critical theory and in postcolonial studies, which use it both to reread the records of the first European explorers in America and to face such crucial matters as those of language, of translation, and of subalternity in ex‐colonial contexts. In general, the Caliban figure might serve to critique and decode the modern discourse, which started to affirm itself after the colonial encounter.
Canadian Postcolonial Studies
Authors: Moss Laura
Published: June 2017

Specifically Canadian approaches to postcolonial studies acknowledge and trace the legacies of colonialism within Canada in relation to Indigenous peoples, Quebec, and English Canada within a framework of officially recognized multiculturalism in a bilingual context. Particular to the Canadian context of postcolonial studies is the foundational recognition of Canada's history as a colony that was responsible for the subjugation and colonization of Indigenous peoples. This highlights the complicated nature of postcolonialism in Canada – as a colony that colonized intranationally. In addition, postcolonialists consider the history of the independence movement in Quebec and the ongoing critical engagement with cultural and linguistic diversity and official multiculturalism. Contemporary postcolonialism in Canada emerged out of the study of world literatures written in English, with an emphasis on issues of marginalization, hybridity, local language development, educational reform, and “writing back.” It persists in conjunction with studies of critical race, diaspora, globalization, environmentalism, and Indigenous rights.
Caribbean Literature in Dutch and Other Languages
Authors: Dewulf Jeroen
Published: June 2017

Anti‐colonialism in the Caribbean dates back to the earliest colonial presence at the end of the fifteenth century. It has involved slave resistance, revolution, and intellectual challenges to colonial rule articulated by journalists, scholars, activists, democratic politicians, and armed rebels. It has included different manifestations of nationalism, constitutionally based Creole nationalism and more radical Black Nationalism, as well as the decision to abolish colonial rule by incorporating the colony into the metropole. In the territories of the American, Dutch, and French Caribbean there continue to be active anti‐colonial expressions into the twenty‐first century.
Cartography and Navigation
Authors: Tally Robert T.
Published: June 2017

Modern cartography and navigation developed alongside European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, often contributing to the colonization processes while at the same time being shaped by them. Of course, cartography is not an entirely objective art or science, and the very act of mapping a space often reveals political and cultural motives or effects. Thus, for example, the choice to depict Greenwich, England, as the center of the world map, with the prime meridian running through it, discloses a certain Eurocentric bias that makes Western Europe a “home” and other regions “far‐flung.” Mapmaking is always and already an ideological activity, even before the maps are decisively put to political uses by one group or another. Similarly, the navigational developments that accompanied the rise of modern cartography in Europe made possible the more expansive and intensive colonization of remote regions. These developments in cartography and navigation together, then, were simultaneously the result of and the motive force behind European colonization. Not surprisingly, postcolonial theorists have taken a keen interest in matters of space, place, and mapping.
Chamoiseau, Patrick
Authors: Sankara Edgard
Published: June 2017

Patrick Chamoiseau (b. 1953) is one of the most creative writers and critical thinkers of the Caribbean. Along with his fellow countrymen Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé, Chamoiseau is the author of the 1989 literary manifesto
Éloge de la créolité
; the three men are considered the primary partisans of the theory of “Créolité”. Chamoiseau's endeavor to preserve Creole culture has been saluted despite its controversy. His political engagement, in line with his fictional and critical works, aiming at liberating Martinique from France's domination, has been praised.
Clarke, Austin
Authors: Lopez‐Ropero Lourdes
Published: June 2017

Austin Clarke is a Canada‐based novelist, short story writer and memoirist born in Barbados. He is one the best known black authors in Canada and a prominent member of the Caribbean literary diaspora. Clarke's work is concerned with the West Indian experience of migration in Canada, as well as with colonial and postcolonial Caribbean society.
Commonwealth Literature
Authors: Reddy Sheshalatha
Published: June 2017

Originating in the late 1950s and early 1960s during a period of decolonization, the category of Commonwealth literature is inseparable from the history of the Commonwealth of Nations. Encompassing Anglophone literature from the former British colonies, it paradoxically excluded literature from Great Britain within its purview. While an emphasis was initially placed on literature from the former settler colonies, Commonwealth literature scholars soon became attentive towards literary production from the former occupied colonies as well. Often critiqued for its marginalization of the literature studied (as separate from and therefore secondary to British literature proper), its lack of interest in literatures in languages other than English, and its lack of political engagement, Commonwealth literary studies has been largely incorporated into and become inseparable from postcolonial literary studies and theory in the last two decades.
Criollismo
Authors: Hanneken Jaime
Published: June 2017

The literature of
criollismo
, dating approximately to the first half of the twentieth century, articulated an autochthonous Latin American identity based in traditional rural cultures. Its principal focus on the portrayal of popular customs and local landscapes sought to cement a homogeneous self‐image among populations rapidly transformed by processes of modernization and urbanization, and to promote regional autonomy from North American and European cultural influences.
Crime,
Thuggee
Authors: Viswanathan Rashmi Meenakshi
Published: June 2017

“
Thuggee
” refers to bands of criminals who were said to have moved about India's highways in the precolonial and colonial eras. According to colonial histories, these highway brigands were reputed to perform highly ritualized depredations on lonely travelers, including strangulation and body mutilation, in the service of a patron goddess. In the early nineteenth century, the British administration identified
thuggee
as a problematic social grouping and carried out campaigns to extirpate this perceived threat, resulting in anti‐thuggee legislation that criminalized entire social groupings. In the past two decades, historians have complicated colonial narratives by seeking information beyond the colonial archive, and historicizing the circumstances within which social solidarities took to migratory labor or highway brigandage. Though the origins of the phenomenon of thuggee are opaque, new readings offer alternative contemplations of its epistemological terrain, as loci of power at the periphery of the colonial infrastructure, or sites of political contestation.
Dabydeen, David
Authors: De Aparajita
Published: June 2017

David Dabydeen (born 1956) is a Caribbean writer of the Indian diaspora. He is currently the Guyanese ambassador to China. Dabydeen's repertoire includes poetry, novels, criticism, fiction, and nonfiction. His writing is marked by themes of identity, belonging, and societal and cultural transformation through the play of history and movement.
Darwish, Mahmoud
Authors: Khnifess Amir
Published: June 2017

Mahmoud Darwish was the national poet of the Palestinians and one of their most important cultural ambassadors during the twentieth and early twenty‐first century. Through his poetry, Darwish managed more than anyone to describe the tragedy that befell the Palestinians as a result of the 1948 Arab‐Israeli War. He portrayed their pain in exile and their struggle for return to their homeland. To this end, Darwish remains one of the most significant symbols of Palestinian national identity.
Djebar, Assia
Authors: Lutz Clemens Colleen
Published: June 2017

Assia Djebar (1936–2015) published many books of fiction, poetry, and critical work; directed several films; and brought the voice of the Maghreb to the world. A fierce proponent for women and their human rights, Djebar made use of her relationship to France and Algeria in her complex body of work.
Dutch Empire
Authors: Mills Dan
Published: June 2017

Despite almost constant involvement in foreign wars early in its history, the Dutch Empire rose to prominence in the seventeenth century and quickly became one of the most powerful naval presences in the world. Alongside the English, their naval rivals with whom they fought three separate wars, the Dutch Empire helped establish the flourishing Atlantic slave trade in the mid to late seventeenth century. In their pursuit of naval and slave trade superiority, the Dutch Empire would eventually establish a presence that reached from North America to modern‐day Indonesia, and this presence would leave lasting effects on the culture, history, and even languages of these locations.
Ecocriticism
Authors: DeLoughrey Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

The field of ecocriticism, which critically engages with the figure of nonhuman nature in literature and other artistic works, has multiple genealogies and approaches. The most vital in recent years has been an unprecedented scholarly interest in postcolonial ecocriticism which, as a rapidly growing field, has broadened to investigate an array of topics such as environmental imperialism, world ecologies, imperial debris, the global commons, militarism and militourism, resource extraction and petrocapitalism, food and water sovereignty, slow violence, disaster capitalism, biopolitics, indigenous and alternative epistemologies, environmentalism of the poor, toxicity and fallout, climate change, and neoliberalism and debt. Due to the intellectual genealogies of the field of postcolonial study, its approaches to the figure of the environment are generally comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretical. Postcolonial ecocriticism has also engaged deeply with other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, and political ecology, and been a vital perspective in the emergent field of environmental humanities.
Erdrich, Louise
Authors: Sneider Leah
Published: June 2017

Louise Erdrich is a prolific award‐winning author of Native American literature in various genres. Her best‐known novel is
Love Medicine
(1984), which is part of a series of novels. Her work focuses on families living in the northern plains area and of Métis, Ojibwe, and German descent. The themes of history and blood are central to much of her work.
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi and Postcolonial African Philosophy
Authors: Bongmba Elias Kifon
Published: June 2017

Emmanuel Chukudi Eze has argued that postcolonial African philosophy rejects colonial and imperial views of Africa. He demonstrates in his writings that some European philosophers denied that Africans have reason and, for that reason, the practice of postcolonial criticism invites a rejection of these racist views as well as a critique of the African postcolony.
French Empire
Authors: Ha Marie‐Paule
Published: June 2017

The history of the French colonial empire is generally divided into two broad phases. The first colonial empire, acquired chiefly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprised a large part of North America, islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, and trading posts in Senegal and India. The second phase began in 1830 with the invasion of Algeria, reaching its apex under the Third Republic. By the late nineteenth century, France had taken control of extensive territories in North and West Africa and Southeast Asia, but the empire came unraveled in the decades following World War II. The impetus for France's colonial expansion was given by four main factors: rivalry with Britain over world dominance, the need to uphold its status as world power, commercial motives seeking to carve out new markets for French capital, and missionary evangelism aspiring to convert millions of pagans to Christianity.
Fuentes, Carlos
Authors: Crane Nicholas Jon
Published: June 2017

Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) was an award‐winning Mexican author of novels, short stories, literary and political essays, and articles. Fuentes is best known for his criticism of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and Mexican politics in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Authoring many works of historical fiction, Fuentes also troubled commonsense notions of time. Fuentes remained interested in themes of time, memory, and historical imagination in the last years of his life. Recent scholarship more explicitly examines his political writings and social justice concerns, with some scholars questioning Fuentes's redirection of attention to more specifically aesthetic concerns as well as his apparent willingness, from the 1970s to 1990s, to accommodate the Mexican political establishment of which he was once so critical.
Goodison, Lorna
Authors: Jenkins Lee M.
Published: June 2017

This entry surveys Lorna Goodison's poetry, identifying its major themes of matrilineal inheritance and the transformative power of poetry and the poet as these are developed over the seven collections she has published to date. The entry connects the key preoccupations of her poems to those of her nonfictional prose and stories, and to her work as a visual artist. It draws attention to Goodison's role as mediator between a vernacular Jamaican culture and Western literary tradition, and her consummate skill as a code switcher who moves between linguistic registers. The entry also considers Goodison's subversion of gendered archetypes, of woman, mother, and island, found in the work of her Caribbean near‐contemporaries, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott.
Guerrillas in Latin America
Authors: Kroll‐Bryce Christian
Published: June 2017

A “freedom fighter” for some, a criminal for others, the guerrilla is undeniably intertwined in highly complex ways with the sociopolitical development of Latin America during the twentieth century, specially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution when guerrilla organizations multiplied throughout the region.
Head, Bessie
Authors: Ribeiro Orquidea
Published: June 2017

Bessie Head was born in apartheid South Africa in 1937, the child of a white mother and a black father. She qualified as a primary school teacher, but soon gave up this career to become a reporter. She immigrated to Botswana in her twenties and settled in Serowe, the historical village that produced the first president of Botswana. Her work reflects the local culture, history, and customs of the Tswana people, emphasizing the value of ordinary life and humble people. As a harsh realist, resistant and reactionary, Head embodies the contradictions of South Africa under apartheid and of Botswana after independence in 1966. In the late 1970s she was granted Botswanan citizenship, but her legacy as a writer is also recognized by South Africa.
Heinemann Publishers
Authors: Chan Winnie
Published: June 2017

Founded by William Heinemann in 1890, Heinemann became the most successful publisher of fiction in Britain in the early twentieth century. Through a series of acquisitions, takeovers, and restructurings, it became a global enterprise as it established branches in the former colonies. Among the most influential of its undertakings was the African Writers Series, launched as a series of textbooks by Heinemann Educational Books in 1962. Both William Heinemann and Heinemann Education endure as subsidiaries of the global publishing giant Penguin Random House.