bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dickens and Demolition
Authors: Hofer-Robinson Joanna
Published: May 2019

Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?
Introduction
Authors: Hofer-Robinson Joanna
Published: May 2019

Sentimental obituaries published after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 remark that phrases and characters from his fiction “[mingle] with our daily converse and our daily life” (Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun. 1870, p. 4). This is certainly true. However, the convivial tone of this eulogy obscures how literary afterlives were appropriated to argue for material changes to London’s built environment, the effects of which were often misaligned with Dickens’s broadly humanitarian ethos. For example, tropes, extracts, and characters from his novels were mobilised to advocate the demolition of insanitary and overcrowded slum areas, but such modernisations were rarely accompanied by the building of new housing for the displaced population. The introduction to Dickens and Demolition introduces these central concerns of the book: to trace Dickensian afterlives across multiple media and fora; to examine what role these afterlives played in urban development discourses; and to argue that fiction was part of the dialectical relations between past, present and future, through which London’s modernisation was conceived and represented. The chapter also introduces key terminology, such as remediation, appropriation, and adaptation.
Dickensian Afterlives and the Demolition of Field Lane
Authors: Hofer-Robinson Joanna
Published: May 2019

Field Lane was envisioned as a nexus of crime, overcrowding, foreignness, social unrest and insanitary conditions in representations of the district in multiple media and contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. In London more widely, these anxieties helped to shape how improvements were conceived, and which places were targeted for demolition. This chapter presents evidence that the improvements promised by advocates of Field Lane’s redevelopment were repeatedly articulated and conceptualised through references to Oliver Twist. For example, by emphasising its association with Fagin and Bill Sikes to draw attention to the slum as a dangerous locale. Focusing on appropriations of Dickens’s works in newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary debates, the chapter traces a proliferation of Dickensian afterlives in commentaries on Field Lane’s improvement before, during and after its demolition. Of course, as is the case with all the afterlives analysed in this book, the novel was variously appropriated, even when users commented on the same site or descriptive passage. However, it is in this instability that we can see how Dickensian afterlives were put to work in arguments for Field Lane’s demolition. His fiction provided a mobile and rhetorically effective vocabulary, which was easily manipulated to serve numerous interests.
Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema
Authors: Harvey James
Published: May 2019

In Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, James Harvey contends that Rancière’s writing allows us to broach art and politics on the very same terms: each involves the visible and the invisible, the heard and unheard, and the distribution of bodies in a perceivable social order. Between making, performing, viewing and sharing films, a space is constructed for tracing and realigning the margins of society, allowing us to consider the potential of cinema to create new political subjects. Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?
The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
Authors: Claes Koenraad
Published: May 2019

This chapter proves that even some the smallest little magazines can be read as portfolios for the artists and authors who produced them. The critical success of the Hobby Horse (see Chapter 2) encouraged the foundation of the coterie publication the Dial (1889–97) by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, struggling artists who used this periodical to obtain publicity for themselves and a select set of participating friends (incl. ‘Michael Field’, John Gray, Thomas Sturge Moore, Lucien Pissarro). Intriguingly theorized along the lines of the Mallarméan Livre, the Dial also functioned as a means of promoting the artistic crafts of engraving and typography. The single issue of the Pagan Review (1892) was written entirely by William Sharp under various pseudonyms, corresponding to different personae that presented different facets of the magazine’s titular ‘paganism’ and allowed the author to test out different styles and themes for possible future writing projects. The whimsical Page (1898–1901) of Edward Gordon Craig, who would become a leading designer for the modernist stage, was another (nearly) single-authored publication. Craig primarily used it to advertise his services as a designer of bookplates, dinner menus and other forms of artistic printing.
Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
Authors: Claes Koenraad
Published: May 2019

Most late-Victorian little magazines were published from London, but elsewhere in Britain relevant journals were also produced, often functioning as the periodical organs of localised organisations that wanted to engage with the local communities in which they operated. The Arts & Crafts journal the Quest (1894–96), issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, ‘resisted any structural differentiation between the worlds of production and consumption, preferring the unified ideal of a community of producers meeting common needs through mutual cooperation’. Outside of England, writers of the budding Celtic Revival wrote for several little magazines, but few notable little magazines were set up before the early twentieth century. One notable exception was the Edinburgh-based Evergreen (1895–96), perhaps the late Victorian era’s best example of a conceptually integrated periodical, this time not only inspired by a local variant of the collaborative spirit characterising the Arts and Crafts journals, but also meant to exemplify an advocated ‘organic’ unity for the city where its producers lived and worked, and from there for Scotland and ‘North Britain’ at large.
Ideas, Attitudes and Ambitions
Authors: McCallum John
Published: May 2019

The first chapter analyses early modern Scottish thinking on the poor, their condition, and their relief. While emphasising significant continuities from late medieval attitudes, it argues that improving provision for the poor was a key concern of the Protestant reformers and their successors, and other elites in post-Reformation Scotland. It considers desires to reform and improve relief (and to penalise unworthy beggars and their ilk), and also explores more personal and individual attitudes to the concept of charity across the period. There remained a strong religious imperative for relief. Charity was no longer technically good for one’s soul in the Protestant world, but it remained a key element in religious life, and a great concern to many.
Conclusion
Authors: McCallum John
Published: May 2019

The problem of poverty was not a new one after 1560, and the desire to improve the treatment of the deserving poor (and to exclude and control the undeserving) was not an invention of the Protestant Reformation, nor of the sixteenth century. The Scottish Protestant reformers certainly wanted to improve welfare provision. But far more important than their rhetorical statements on the issue, or those of their opponents, were the institutional mechanisms they created as part of their new church. Through the kirk session, the Reformation of 1559–60 created the possibility for a localised and routine system of poor relief that was entirely unprecedented in Scotland. In the following decades, local ministers, elders and deacons began to put that possibility into practice....
Cultivating Extreme Art Cinema
Authors: Hobbs Simon
Published: May 2019

The use of hard-core sex and brutal violence in films such as Antichrist, Romance and Irreversible has been branded by many as an unsophisticated attempt to attract audiences. These accusations of gimmickry have been directed towards a range of extreme art films, however they have rarely been explored in detail. This book therefore seeks to investigate the validity of these claims by considering the extent to which these often infamous sequences of extremity inform the commercial identity of the film. Through close textual analysis of various paratexts, the book examines how sleeve designs, blurbs, and special features manage these extreme reputations, and the extent to which they exploit the supposed value of extremity. The book positions the tangible home video product as a bearer of meaning, capable of defining the public persona of the film. The book explores the ways home video artefacts communicate to both highbrow and lowbrow audiences by drawing from contradicting marketing traditions, as well as examining the means through which they breach long-standing taste distinctions. Including case studies from both art cinema and exploitation cinema – such as Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom, Weekend and Antichrist – the book explores the complicated dichotomies between these cinematic traditions, offering a fluid history of extreme art cinema while challenging existing accounts of the field. Ultimately, the book argues that extremity – far from being a simple marketing tool – is a complex and multifaceted commercial symbol.
Lars von Trier: Provocation, Condemnation and Confrontation
Authors: Hobbs Simon
Published: May 2019

Lars von Trier role as a provocateur, although well established, is central to his paratextuality. Approaching his performances in the film festival space as additional paratexts, the chapter shows how the director adds a transgressive capital to his films through these external acts. The chapter then instigates a detailed paratextual study of Antichrist. The chapter illustrates how Chelsea Films, a sub-branch of the larger Curzon conglomerate, adopts a generic horror schema for its paratextual presentation of Antichrist. Discussing the ramifications of the company’s decision to position a pair of bloody scissors on the film’s cover, the chapter concludes that the use of a horror narrative image simplifies the text and nullifies its arthouse credentials. Thereafter, the chapter explores Artificial Eye’s remediation, suggesting that the company are unsuccessful in their attempt to redefine the film within the parameters of art cinema. Finishing with an exploration of the film’s involvement in the Film4 Extreme Season, the chapter highlights the differences between the commercial representation of extremity on DVD and Television, showing the latter to be more flexible.
Introduction
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

This introduction discusses trends in late 20th and early 21st century cinema that have opened a space for international directors to extend the postcolonial critiques of their native national cinemas to an international scale. Increasingly, filmmakers from postcolonial nations have opted to undertake film adaptations of British literature, frequently choosing the Victorian literature of Britain’s imperial century as their source texts as a way to integrate the perspectives of their homelands into works that stereotype or ignore the presence of the colonized. Through tracing the evolution of adaptation theory over the past decade, this overview highlights the need for a hybrid adaptation model that takes into account the increasingly globalized nature of Hollywood and postcolonial adaptation. Introducing the interfidelity approach to adaptation, I examine how it attempts to bridge the field’s rich history of criticism with a politically relevant analysis informed by postcolonial theory. Applying this approach to Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong, I consider the film as a rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the 1933 original King Kong that negotiates a Kiwi settler colonial identity built on Victorian colonialism and contending with Hollywood’s global scope.
An American Kipling: Colonial Discourse, Settler Culture and the Hollywood Studio System in George Stevens’ Gunga Din
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

Serious scholarly attention to Gunga Din(1939) has largely been neglected as allegations of condescending and one-dimensional depictions of its Indian characters have disrupted its reputation as one of the greatest epics of the studio era.However, George Stevens’ adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem extends its source text’s colonial ambivalence to American anxieties stemming from the death rattle of Manifest Destiny and the traumas of the Great Depression. Seizing upon the popularity of late Victorian Empire narratives, Hollywood integrated its own ideology into a final product that was a hybrid of imperial narrative and American western. This chapter argues that the film’s loose resemblance to its source material demonstrates a fissure in the American valorization of British culture. Gunga Din completely dismantles Kipling’s poem, recreating it as an example of a uniquely American form: the seamless studio system product that led to Hollywood’s international dominance in cultural production. While the politics of the adaptation resemble textual strategies of resistance common in postcolonial texts, the film’s retention of colonial literature’s representations of its native characters addresses an America beginning to assert a distinct national culture while positioning itself as a future imperial power in the tradition of the faltering British Empire.
‘He Is Not Here by Accident’: Transit, Sin and the Model Settler in Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2000
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines Dracula 2000 as both a resistant text of settler colonial identity and an example of Hollywood’s influence on the Canadian film industry. Seen by Miramax cofounder Bob Weinstein as a potential franchise successor to the recently completed Scream trilogy, the film reunited much of that earlier franchise’s creative team with horror legend Wes Craven assuming the role of producer and passing directorial reigns to longtime Dimension editor and Canadian filmmaker Patrick Lussier. Focusing on a Dracula who is revealed to be an undead Judas Iscariot and a Van Helsing sustained through the 20th Century by injections of Dracula’s blood, the film engages with a poststructuralist cycle of the settler/subject/colonial dynamic. Likewise, the film’s relocation from the imperial centre of London to New Orleans not only positions America as a contemporary imperial power but also harkens back to the port city’s legacy as a hub for slavery and global trade during Stoker’s time. Shot primarily on Canadian sound stages that doubled for London and New Orleans, Dracula 2000 also embodies contemporary production politics in which Hollywood’s relationship to settler nations such as Canada provides economic support for national cinemas while still dominating domestic box office.
Imperial Vanities: Mira Nair, William Makepeace Thackeray and Diasporic Fidelity to Vanity Fair
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

Mira Nair has built her career on films that contribute to the Indian identity in diaspora and attest to the prominence of Indian filmmakers in international cinema. For a filmmaker so concerned with the relationships between American and Indian heritage, Nair’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847-1848 novel Vanity Fair (2004) appears as an outlier. However, this chapter argues that Nair’s film maintains overarching fidelity to the source text’s plot as a strategy to imbue the narrative with an Indian perspective. Nair subtly rewrites the text by eliminating the novel’s omniscient narrator and his complicity with the imperial project in favor of her own postcolonial Indian position through her use of cinematic style and the camera’s point-of-view capabilities. In asserting India’s physical presence in her adaptation, Nair also incorporates elements of Bollywood cinema into the production, including an item number dance sequence that brings Hollywood and Bollywood convention in dialogue. As a result, Nair embeds images into the narrative that directly challenge the power of the British Empire and its agents as well as Hollywood’s continuing influence over Indian cinema.
Gentlemanly Gazes: Charles Dickens, Alfonso Cuarón and the Transnational Gulf in Great Expectations
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has remained preoccupied with questions of how globalization shapes identity from his art-house success Y Tu Mamá También(2002) to his Hollywood-financed films Children of Men(2006) and Gravity(2013). Perhaps the most overlooked project in Cuarón’s filmography is his 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, which shifts the narrative to the Gulf Coast and New York City in the 20th century. Though failing to connect with critics and audiences upon its release, the film’s renegotiation of the imperial centre and focus on a setting once colonized by Spain makes the adaptation a cogent commentary on immigration and class mobility within a globalized United States. By paring down the narrative to focus on Pip and Estella’s romantic and sexual liaisons, Cuarón exposes how the waning Empire embodied by Ms. Havisham (now Dinsmoor) uses the young people’s emotions and sexuality to further its agency. Employing the camera’s seemingly objective gaze to dilute Pip’s first-person narration, Cuarón depicts his protagonist as a powerless spectator in the world around him whose status and sexuality are defined by Empire’s authority.1010
Conclusion
Authors: Hollyfield Jerod Ra'Del
Published: May 2019

As the 2008 global recession irrevocably changed entertainment financing, films beyond blockbuster or microbudget production methods became anathema to studios. However, adaptations of Victorian literature did not die in this climate; they merely conformed to market demands whether in the form of Disney adaptations of Alice in Wonderland or a new iteration of BBC prestige drama. The last decade has seen a reduced, albeit largely well-received, series of 19th century-set stories and literature adaptations in theatres and on television, largely bolstered by the rise of streaming. Within this context, interfidelity’s holistic approach and negotiation of specific relationships between texts as well as the production and industrial contexts in which films are produced is all the more vital. In bridging a contrapuntal reading of Victorian works with recent advances in adaptation studies, interfidelity fosters a space in which fidelity is a fundamental tool in tracing the development of Empire from colonial discourse to global capital’s post-recession evolution and its effect on Hollywood production. Though best illustrated by direct application to films that share the context of those discussed in this study, interfidelity is applicable to the host of current adaptation situations that result from Victorian texts’ continuing appeal and Hollywood’s increasingly transnational make-up.
Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Mid-Twentieth Century
Authors: Daw Sarah
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter begins by contextualising the study, discussing the representation of Nature in early Cold War American culture and the emergence of modern environmentalism from 1945. The chapter also outlines the book’s argument that whilst the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is understandably viewed as a watershed moment in terms of raising environmental consciousness in America, Silent Spring should also be considered as part of a developing trend of ecological portrayals of Nature in American literature written after 1945. This opening chapter also situates the book’s argument within the field of Cold War literary studies and introduces the book’s ecocritical methodology, including its sustained engagement with Timothy Morton’s ideas of ‘the mesh’ and ‘the ecological thought’ as outlined in The Ecological Thought (2010).
The Influence of Chinese and Japanese Literature on J. D. Salinger’s Philosophy of Nature
Authors: Daw Sarah
Published: May 2019

Chapter Three begins with analysis of the function of the American West in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The chapter goes on to reveal that Salinger’s literary depictions of Nature are significantly informed by the Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese philosophical texts that he was studying from as early as 1946. The chapter uncovers the sources of translated Taoism to which Salinger was exposed, revealing that the translators Salinger mentions by name in his literary fiction all markedly foreground the role of Nature in their ‘American versions’ of classical Chinese and Japanese texts. Chapter Three then applies this research in close readings of two of Salinger’s later long stories, ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959), and offers a new reading of The Catcher in the Rye. These ecocritical readings expose the substantial influence of the ‘American versions’ of Taoist texts that Salinger studied on his literary depictions of an infinite and ecological Nature.
Bifurcated Nature in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America
Authors: Daw Sarah
Published: May 2019

Chapter Five takes the temporal range of the book beyond the publication of Silent Spring, through analysis of the writing of Nature by the critic and novelist Mary McCarthy. The chapter reveals the governing influence of the French philosopher Simone Weil on McCarthy’s presentation of Nature as an ecological system in her fiction and non-fiction writing. The chapter reads McCarthy’s 1971 novel Birds of America alongside her first two Vietnam War reports, Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968), which she interrupted the writing of Birds to research. This approach reveals the continuity of ideas between McCarthy’s fiction and non-fiction writing from this period, as well as the sustained philosophical and rhetorical influence of Weil. Analysis of these non-fiction texts alongside the novel illuminates McCarthy’s literary presentations of an ecological Nature and her particularly nuanced response to her fellow Americans’ growing environmental consciousness in Birds of America.
The Roylotts of Stoke Moran
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

Dr Grimesby Roylott, the wicked stepfather in ‘The Speckled Band’, is one of Conan Doyle’s most grotesque, gothic villains. Like several other evildoers in the Holmes stories – Jonathan Small in The Sign of Four, Colonel Barclay in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), Colonel Sebastian Moran in ‘The Empty House’ – Roylott has gone bad in the East. Having established a medical practice in Calcutta, he narrowly avoided execution after beating his servant to death in a fit of rage: his stepdaughter Helen Stoner tells Holmes that ‘[v]iolence of temper approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my stepfather’s case it had, I believe, been intensifi ed by his long residence in the tropics’ (175). After serving a prison sentence in India, he returned to England ‘a morose and disappointed man’ (175), and attempted to put his medical knowledge to good use by establishing a new medical practice in London.
A Scandal in East Yorkshire
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

Holmes is frequently employed by a client in order to avert, or suppress a scandal. While secrecy is the client’s objective, the scandal itself is – usually – revealed to the privileged reader. This is exemplified by the very first Holmes short story, whose scandalous subject is even declared in its title. When the King of Bohemia employs Holmes to save his forthcoming marriage to Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia, full details of the incriminating evidence – letters and a cabinet photograph1 – are revealed in a comic catechism between Holmes and the King: ‘If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?’ ‘There is the writing.’ ‘Pooh, pooh! Forgery.’ ‘My private note-paper.’ ‘Stolen.’ ‘My own seal.’ ‘Imitated.’ ‘My photograph.’ ‘Bought.’ ‘We were both in the photograph.’ ‘Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion.’ (Adventures, 13)
A Nobler Man Never Walked the Earth
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

One of the most problematic characters in any Holmes story is Steve Dixie, the black gangster who bursts into Holmes’s room at the beginning of ‘The Three Gables’. He is a man of contradictions, simultaneously ridiculed and full of menace. His size and apparent physical aggression – ‘his sullen dark eyes’ have ‘a smouldering gleam of malice in them’ (Case-Book, 133) – are in counterpoint to his comic appearance: Watson remarks on his ‘very loud grey check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie’ (133). Instructed by his superior to warn Holmes that his life is at threat ‘if he go down Harrow way’ (134), he enters like ‘a mad bull’ and twice threatens Holmes with physical violence: ‘It won’t be so damn fi ne if I have to trim you up a bit’ (133); ‘you’ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip’ (134).
Oaths and Secrets
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

Organised criminality and violence appear frequently in the Holmes stories. A Study in Scarlet imagines Brigham Young’s nascent Mormon state as a tightly knit conspiratorial organisation, exerting uncompromising control over its membership even beyond its notional borders. An ideological conspiracy of a very different kind lies behind the surreal menace of ‘The Five Orange Pips’, in which the Ku Klux Klan enforces its organisational rules through fear-inducing symbols, followed by swift and merciless punishment. The clues in this story reveal the organisation’s global reach: at their home in Horsham, the Openshaws receive letters from the Klan postmarked Pondicherry, Dundee and East London; Holmes discovers that the murderers of John Openshaw are led by the captain of the barque Lone Star, registered in Savannah, Georgia. The Sicilian Mafi a is behind the theft of the Borgia Pearl in ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ (1904), and ‘The Red Circle’ features another Italian crime syndicate.
Conclusion
Authors: Glazzard Andrew
Published: May 2019

‘You will be amused to hear that I am at work upon a Sherlock Holmes story. So the old dog returns to his vomit.’1

Arthur Conan Doyle to Herbert Greenhough Smith

Sherlock Holmes, who died in Switzerland in May 1891, returned to the world on 23 October 1899. The location for his rebirth was, somewhat surprisingly, the Star Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Early the following month, Holmes moved to New York where he could be found in Manhattan’s Garrick Theatre on 236 separate occasions, before making his way across the United States. In September 1901, Holmes went back to Great Britain, arriving (like so many travellers from the US) at Liverpool, before reaching London on 9 September 1901. He was so much in demand that on 1 February 1902 he received an audience with King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. In 1902 he was again in New York, was seen travelling across northern England in 1903, and for the next thirty years popped up repeatedly in various American towns and cities....
Shakespeare's Moral Compass
Authors: Parvini Neema
Published: May 2019

This ground-breaking study fearlessly combines latest research in evolutionary psychology, historical scholarship and philosophy to answer a question that has eluded critics for centuries: what is Shakespeare’s moral vision? At a political and cultural moment in which many of us are taking stock and looking for meaning, and in which moral outrage and polarisation seem endemic, this book radically reimagines how we might approach great works of literature to find some answers.
Sanctity
Authors: Parvini Neema
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the link between sin and dirtiness, disease or contagion in Shakespeare by looking at some key examples in King Lear, Timon of Athens, Othello, Richard III, Hamlet,Othello, and Macbeth. It also compares Shakespeare’s sometimes gruesome descriptions of degradation with those found in the Protestant theology of Richard Hooker and John Calvin, who each provide dark visons of human impurity. It also cross references Catholic teachings on sin as embodied in Thomas Aquinas. In the process, the chapter attempts to discover what was sacred to Shakespeare.
Writing Cosmopolitan History in Nineteenth-century China: Li Huanyi’s Words and Deeds of Islamic Exemplars
Authors: Chen J. Lilu
Published: May 2019

This chapter suggests that we understand cosmopolitanism among Hui Muslims in nineteenth-century China as the ability to situate oneself in relation to both Chinese and Islamic history. Based on Li Huanyi’s 1874 Words and Deeds of Islamic Exemplars (Ch. Qingzhen xianzheng yanxing lüe), the chapter shows how Hui Muslims forged a universal history addressing two poles of authority—one in the Chinese court and the other in the Prophet Muhammad. In particular, the figure of Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, the Companion of the Prophet Muhammad reputedly dispatched to Chang’an, emerges in Li’s history as the crucial spatial and temporal link joining Arabia and the Chinese court. By showing how subsequent accounts of imperial Muslim figures are portrayed as continuing Waqqāṣ’ service in China, this chapter argues that Li deploys this universal Islamic history not to undermine but rather to legitimate the power of the Chinese imperial state.
Bordering Malaya’s ‘Benighted Lands’: Frontiers of Race and Colonialism on the Malay Peninsula, 1887–1902
Authors: Malhi Amrita
Published: May 2019

From 1891 to 1895, the Pahang War disrupted Britain’s enclosure of territory on the Malay Peninsula. Fought in response to an uprising by up to 700 rebels in Pahang, the war was not only a means for controlling damage to British interests but also an arena for a subtle, geopolitical contest between Britain and Siam for the Siamese tributaries, including Kelantan and Terengganu. During this period Terengganu, sheltered by legal and territorial constructs that kept the Siamese frontier open until 1902, was becoming a hub for perang sabil (‘holy war’) against British and Siamese ‘competitive colonialisms’. Known to be providing discursive, human, and other political resources to the Pahang rebels, Terengganu came to be portrayed as a ‘wild’ and ‘benighted’ place by Pahang’s British Resident Hugh Clifford, an important broker of the colonial race-thinking deployed as a means for controlling and taming the frontier.
Introduction
Authors: Ingleby Matthew , Kerr Matthew P. M.
Published: May 2019

In the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, the British cultural imagination turned to coasts. Prior to this period, coasts tended to be thought of as uninviting, even dangerous, places – ‘repulsive’, according to Alain Corbin.1 A compound of interlinked developments – in medicine, in aesthetics, in leisure, in law, in military strategy, for example – altered the prevailing mood, however, and during the long nineteenth century, the coast was visited more often, and by an increasingly diverse collection of people. This swell of interest in the littoral meant that coasts began to function as zones of cultural and commercial interchange. In part, this was because coasts became places of literal intermingling, where geologists and quack doctors, composers and painters, holidaymakers and recluses might meet intentionally or accidentally. Geological tourists followed Mary Anning to Lyme Regis in droves to purchase or discover for themselves sea-shells by the sea-shore. And towards the end of the nineteenth century, artists formed colonies at Pont-Aven, St Ives and elsewhere....
A Breath of Fresh Air: Constable and the Coast
Authors: Payne Christiana
Published: May 2019

John Constable is often thought of as a painter of trees, canals and meadows; country labourers and wagons. His coastal paintings are considered a somewhat peripheral part of his output. Yet they are central to his concerns with light, atmosphere and weather. This chapter looks at Constable’s studies of the coast in relation to three important meanings it held for him and for many others of this time. The sea seen from the coast was a metaphor for life, death, immortality and the power of a benevolent Creator; the sea and shore together constituted a boundary which protected Britain from enemy invasion; and the coastal region was a place of fresh breezes, a source of easy breathing and life-giving fecundity.
The Battle of Torquay: The Late Victorian Resort as Social Experiment
Authors: Kneale James
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers drink and temperance in Victorian ports and resorts. Where there was drink there would invariably be temperance; the visibility of drunkenness in the major British ports made them the focus of temperance reform. Temperance also figured in smaller towns, becoming one aspect of polite society in fashionable resorts and even financing public works. But was there anything specific about drink and temperance on the coast? Rob Shields once suggested that such ‘places on the margin’ might allow heterotopic reworkings of social order. The ‘Battle of Torquay’ between well-heeled Torquay society and working-class Salvation Army members suggests the coast as a site of transformation, but also that social control could be turned on abstainers as well as drinkers, producing less progressive places on the coast as well as more liberal ones.
Encounters with Capitalism on R. L. Stevenson’s Early Coasts
Authors: Sergeant David
Published: May 2019

This chapter pursues imaginative continuities in R. L. Stevenson’s writing of the coast across different locations, times and genres – from essays to fiction, from Scotland to California to the South Seas. In doing so it approaches the historical specificities of Stevenson’s shorelines via a back-way route, through the imaginative landscape of his prose – a route that might bring together topics more often neatly demarcated. The influence of Stevenson’s chronic ill health on his writing of the shore is considered, along with his disturbed and hostile attitude to late-Victorian capitalist modernity. The chapter touches on works including ‘On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places’ (1874), ‘The Old Pacific Capital’ (1880), ‘The Merry Men’ (1882), Treasure Island (1883) and The Wrecker (1892).
Saxon Shore to Celtic Coast: Diasporic Telegraphy in the Atlantic World
Authors: Murray Brian H.
Published: May 2019

Little attention has been paid to the effect of the distinctly Celtic provenance of transatlantic telegraphy: the electrical bond of sympathy between America and Britain, the two great ‘Anglo-Saxon nations’, was facilitated by a cable connecting a series of points on Greater Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ – Porthcurno in Cornwall, Valentia Island off County Kerry, and St. John’s, Newfoundland (an island largely populated by Irish Catholic migrants). The ‘annihilation of time and space’ is one of the most persistent clichés surrounding the popular perception of Victorian telecommunications, and yet the telegraph could also enforce the remoteness and isolation of coastal cultures. This chapter explores this topic by analysing representations which run counter to the dominant narrative of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ empire, instead mingling an archaic ‘Celtic Twilight’ with machine dreams of a networked modernity, as the industrial is brought into dramatic collision with the maritime picturesque.
Marine Bizarrerie: The Imaginative Biology of the Underwater Frontier
Authors: Cohen Margaret
Published: May 2019

The great variety and radical metamorphoses of aquatic life forms attracted huge fascination during the nineteenth century, in part because they defied familiar paradigms of development and progress. In this chapter, Cohen explores how writers were inspired by such marine life-cycles to try out experiments in narrative prose, focusing in particular on the influence of marine variety on the depiction of psychological experience. Starting with Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus (1855), Cohen argues that Kingsley uses the life forms of the underwater kingdom to re-energise the poetic figure of metamorphosis, which, in his treatment, depends more upon natural science than myth. Cohen then shows how Kingsley translates marine metamorphosis into narrative experiment in The Water-Babies (1862), and creates an account of psychological experience that is more hallucinatory and phantasmagorical than developmental. Cohen finally suggests that marine metamorphosis has a similar impact on other authors, including Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet, all of whom stress the disturbing and disruptive possibilities of a psychological prose inspired by aquatic biology.
Developing Fluid: Precision, Vagueness and Gustave Le Gray’s Photographic Beachscapes
Authors: Kerr Matthew P. M.
Published: May 2019

In 1856, Gustave Le Gray’s photographs were included in the fourth annual exhibition of the Photographic Society in London. They caused an immediate sensation. La Revue photographique observed: ‘This time, Le Gray has gone beyond the limits of what could be achieved’. Taking as a starting point Philip Hamerton’s famous claim that photography ‘is not capable of giving two truths at once’, this chapter investigates Le Gray’s repeated depiction of sea and sky in order to suggest a coastal photography that was technically and thematically at home with limits, thresholds and margins.
Reflections on the Status of the Awliyāᵓ
Authors: Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter addresses the status of awliya’, or saints and holy men, and other icons venerated by the general populace for different reasons. The chapter discusses the need for a tangible, rather than an abstract, form of spirituality and takes a critical stance towards the over-veneration of such icons almost to the point of sanctification, tying it to remnants of pagan religions as well as historical customs and traditions kept alive by the general populace.
The Decline in the Position of the Clergy in the Eyes of Muslims
Authors: Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

In this chapter, Amin traces the decline in opinion of the clergy among contemporary Muslims, following their veneration in the early centuries of Islam, all the way to the contempt with which they are almost viewed in the twentieth century. He engages with the reasons for this change in perception.
A Plea for Religious Reform
Authors: Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

The final chapter closes the circle of problems identified in the first chapter which lead to the sorrowfulness of contemporary Muslims and which are discussed at length in the individual chapters that follow. In conclusion, Amin hopes for reform and discusses some possible solutions to the problems he identifies.
Introduction
Authors: Branca Paolo L. , Amin Hussein Ahmad
Published: May 2019

Not Provided
The Art of Science: Nineteenth-Century Theory and the Logic of Practice
Authors: Erchinger Philipp
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines how nineteenth-century philosophers from William Paley and Charles Darwin to John S. Mill and William Whewell described and debated the relations between art and science as well as practice and theory. Offering close readings of Paley’s Natural Theology and of various passages from Charles Darwin’s work on breeding and gardening, the chapter distinguishes between two conceptions of art in the sense of skilful practice: art as guided by knowledge and different from nature on the one hand and art as productive of knowledge as well as continuous with an evolving nature on the other. As the chapter argues, these two notions of art played a key role in a controversy between John S. Mill and William Whewell that was carried out, between 1840 and 1872, through successive editions of their published works. Engaging closely with the style and spirit in which this debate was conducted, the chapter shows that Mill and Whewell argued from radically different conceptions of what ‘science’ means. As a result, they disagreed, for instance, about the very question of what constitutes a logical form of argument or proof.
Following the Actors: G. H. Lewes’s and George Eliot’s Studies in Life
Authors: Erchinger Philipp
Published: May 2019

Opening with a look at the character of Benjulia from Wilkie Collins’s novel Heart and Science, this chapter turns to G. H. Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies. As it argues, Collins’s Benjulia is unhappily tied to a position-based notion of knowledge that separates him from whatever he seeks to grasp. By contrast, Lewes’s studies exemplify an enquiry that goes along with its subject-matters, rather than trying to capture and contain them in an ideal place apart from the observer. Thus, Lewes’s essays invite their readers to learn with, rather than from, them. Instead of merely transmitting knowledge about marine life, these works take their readers through an experimental field that is still in the process of being explored. The section goes on to argue that George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss outlines a non-propositional reason that cannot be abstracted from the particular situations and actions in and through which it is expressed. The chapter therefore puts the case that Eliot’s novels and Lewes’s studies investigated different problems through similar methods. This explains why Eliot described her novels as “experiments in life”, a claim that the chapter clarifies by placing it in the context of Emile Zola’s theory of the experimental novel.
The Making of Sensation Fiction
Authors: Erchinger Philipp
Published: May 2019

The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.
Styling Science
Authors: Martin Alison E.
Published: May 2019

This chapter sets out the critical and historical framework of this study by focusing on three key aspects. Firstly, it attends to the characteristic features of and changes in scientific writing in nineteenth-century Britain, taking examples from the work of Charles Lyell, Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, to establish a sense of the repertoire of stylistic models on which Humboldt’s British translators could draw. A second section examines Humboldt’s own writing style and briefly addresses the difficulties inherent in translating it from the French- or German-language originals. Finally, this chapter focuses in particular on style in translation and explores the swiftly evolving field of translation theory in the nineteenth century, drawing in particular on Friedrich Schleiermacher, to contextualise the strategies that Humboldt’s translators were employing.
Dispute and Dissociation: John Black’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811)
Authors: Martin Alison E.
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the first of Humboldt’s works to appear in English translation, John Black’s oft-maligned rendering of the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (1808-11) as the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (Longman, 1811). Black resituated and rhetorically manipulated Humboldt’s text by appending a hefty footnote apparatus, which gave the narrative a second, highly audible, paratextual voice in constant dialogue with Humboldt’s own. Black therefore subverted the traditional power differential between author and translator to make the Political Essay critical of the very source text it apparently reproduced. His efforts at establishing his own authority and credibility through self-promotion backfired into intrusive pedantry. However, they did cause Humboldt to consider carefully the need for much closer collaboration with future translators, which offers a neat transition into the next chapter.
‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)
Authors: Martin Alison E.
Published: May 2019

This chapter concentrates on Helen Maria Williams, Paris salonnière, radical author and poet. Her translation of Humboldt’s weighty account of his voyage through the Americas with the French Botanist Aimé Bonpland, the Relation historique du voyage aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814-25), appeared as the seven-volume Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions (Longman, 1814-29). Her rather literal translation was as unpopular as Black’s was well liked by a British readership, but it enjoyed Humboldt’s approval. Previously overlooked archival material detailing the corrections he made to her translation illustrate the close collaborative nature of the undertaking, but also the stylistic freedoms Humboldt permitted her. Williams’s frequently creative (or downright ‘unfaithful’) translational choices favoured the idiom of the sublime in tropical descriptions, which, in their phrasing, also recalled lines from Milton, Thomson or Blake. Williams therefore allowed works from the British literary canon to echo through Humboldt’s prose, making it seem subtly familiar to Anglophone readers. This chapter concludes by focusing briefly on William MacGillivray’s Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt (1832), a successfully revised version of William’s Personal Narrative.
Powers of Disgust: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
Authors: Ellmann Maud
Published: May 2019

Woolf and Mansfield are often noted for their lyricism, but they also share a powerful undercurrent of disgust. This essay considers how recent theories of disgust pertain to their writing, especially to Mansfield’s In a German Pension and Woolf’s The Years. It concludes with a comparison of two short stories, Woolf’s “The Duchess and the Jeweller” (1938) and Mansfield’s ‘Je ne parle pas français’, which have aroused disgusted reactions in their readers.