bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Literary criticism
Authors: Farina Jonathan
Published: June 2017

Literary criticism only became a discipline of academic knowledge production at the end of the nineteenth century; hence, for most of the period, the genre was open to all writers, lacked an adequate technical vocabulary, and largely served commercial and moral ends. This predisciplinary openness engendered creative, productive connections between literary and nonliterary discourses and methods; and the rich Victorian vocabulary of evaluation inscribes many sophisticated assumptions about and responses to writing and reading into Victorian literary criticism. Some of this criticism prefigures the principles that later underwrote practical criticism and New Criticism's formalism; more of it exhibits the methods and objectives that we now associate with New Historicism; and still more exhibits physiological aesthetics amenable to what we now call “affect theory.” But most of it cannot be reduced to a genealogy of modern practices, for it privileges what it calls “suggestion” over interpretation, which has since become nearly synonymous with criticism.
Material culture and things
Authors: Logan Thad
Published: June 2017

Material culture refers to the wide variety of human artifacts that help constitute a social world. The study of material culture plays a key role in many of the social sciences and humanities; thinking about material things is similarly important in much contemporary theory. While there are many possible approaches to material culture studies, there is a body of theoretical works that grounds much current work in the field. A distinctive material culture based on the mass‐produced commodity came into being in the Victorian era, and Victorians themselves were acutely aware of inhabiting a new world of things. Victorian studies has been shaped by its attention to material culture, as this culture was negotiated by Victorian subjects and represented in Victorian art and literature.
Meredith, George
Authors: Arata Stephen
Published: June 2017

As a poet and novelist, George Meredith produced some of the Victorian period's most innovative and challenging literary works. His distinctive style – elliptical, aphoristic, and dense in figurative language – alienated many readers even as it exhilarated many others. The novels of the second half of his career are notable for their portrayals of complex, intelligent women in their struggles to find fulfillment in a patriarchal culture. In his last years Meredith was widely regarded as one of the century's greatest writers, but his reputation quickly plummeted after his death, despite his undoubted influence on many of his modernist successors – including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster.
Moore, George
Authors: Pierse Mary
Published: June 2017

Writer George Moore (1852–1933), member of an important Irish family, played a central part in liberating English literature from Victorian prudishness at the fin de siècle. A prime mover in popularizing impressionist painting in Britain, he transposed impressionist art into literature and imported French realism into the novel. Author of over sixty books including novels, short stories, memoirs, autobiography, plays, essays and poetry, he was an art critic atThe Speaker. He was also a founder, with W. B. Yeats and Edward Martyn, of the Irish Literary Theatre; and he influenced James Joyce. An early modernist, his innovative prose evinced ever‐changing styles and disregarded existing genre boundaries. His storytelling ability is particularly remarkable. Noteworthy in his extensive œuvre are the psychological insights, the wide range of subject matter, the feminist sympathy, the subtle critique, and the musical style. A controversial reputation resulted from his devotion to fearlessness in art, somewhat distracting attention from his literary achievements.
Motherhood
Authors: Gregory Melissa Valiska
Published: June 2017

Motherhood in the Victorian period was idealized, considered women's noblest and highest calling. Mothers were thought to possess a special moral authority that uniquely qualified them to stay at home and raise children. Although the maternal ideal was used to regulate women's lives, Victorian literature often focuses on mothers who do not meet the ideal, featuring transgressive mothers. Maternal transgression includes unwed mothers with illegitimate children as well as mothers who commit infanticide. Victorian mothers were not only represented in literature; they also produced it. Victorian women writers discovered how to exploit the social power of maternal authority in order to expand beyond the domestic sphere not only by working as professional poets, novelists, and periodical editors but also by using maternity as a source of creative inspiration. Ultimately, despite the broad and seemingly coercive implications of maternal ideology, Victorian maternal experience in both literature and real life was often wide‐ranging and diverse.
New Zealand
Authors: Wevers Lydia
Published: June 2017

The colony of New Zealand was founded in 1840 and is synchronous with Victoria's reign. Victorian literature saturated colonial life – a phenomenon reflected in the high number of public libraries. There were many connections between Victorian writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Samuel Butler, and Benjamin Farjeon and the colonists, who were also active in translating Māori legends and proverbs into poetic and other works. Much of the recent interpretation of Victorian literature and its relation to New Zealand is driven by postcolonial critique and concerns.
Orientalism
Authors: Joshi Priti
Published: June 2017

“Orientalism” indicates two distinct and competing things. On the one hand, it refers to the European study of the “orient,” a scholarly engagement that goes back at least to the sixteenth century. “Orientalism,” however, also refers to the
critique
of that European scholarship and representation that was mounted by Edward Said in his 1978 book
Orientalism
. He argues that literature, history, and politics are inextricably intertwined and that orientalism – the study of non‐European peoples and places – was the adjunct of colonialism. Said's argument has been challenged, and also extended and appropriated by numerous scholars since it appeared.
Pirates in publishing
Authors: Gabriele Alberto
Published: June 2017

The reign of Queen Victoria saw the passage of important legislation in England that affected not only the production and circulation of books and periodicals but the status of the author in a global marketplace defined by an incessantly expanding production of pirated editions – that is, “cheap reprints” in several nations. Piracy helped to raise awareness on the necessity to regulate international trade, to make prices of books more competitive in the national market, and to protect intellectual labor internationally. The debates on international copyright law led to the adoption, after 1886, of the Bern Convention stipulations. While most nations ratified the terms of the agreement soon after the convention, the United States did so only in 1891.
Protestant ethic and the novel
Authors: Levine George
Published: June 2017

The Victorian novel, reflecting enormous economic changes, is preoccupied with money, and money almost always causes it both formal and moral complications. To understand these complications, it is useful to take as a guide Max Weber's theory as laid out in
The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism
, which paradoxically argues that religious otherworldliness was a powerful force in the development of capitalism. Realist fiction struggled to reconcile moral and religious purity with the working of the marketplace, and Victorian novelists tended to run into contradictions that their works cannot entirely resolve. Two of the most popular works of the period, Charlotte Yonge's
The Heir of Redclyffe
and Dinah Mullock Craik's
John Halifax, Gentleman
, provide clear examples of such unresolved contradictions and formal failures and might be taken to represent the limits of Victorian fiction's difficulties of coming to terms with money in the new capitalist economy.
Psychology and psychiatry
Authors: Lewis Alexandra
Published: June 2017

Psychology, psychiatry, and literature were intimately connected throughout the nineteenth century. Not only did the psychological novel or psychological realism became a dominant genre (see the works of the Brontës and George Eliot), but sciences of mind also drew upon literary examples and retained a fascination with metaphor even as psychology solidified into a professional discipline, moving from its philosophical, discursive underpinnings toward physiological and empirical orientations. Across movements from faculty psychology to associationism, and from mid‐century physiological to later evolutionary psychology, fiction, medicine, and science were in constant dialogue. Modes of reading depth and surface, of understanding the relations between mind and body, of interpreting character or personality, and of managing sensation filtered between literature and psychiatry, inviting interdisciplinary influence in investigations of phrenology and physiognomy, insanity, the role of the asylum and moral management, mesmerism, self‐will and the unconscious, and fin‐de‐siècle fears of degeneration.
Publishing and circulation
Authors: Bassett Troy J.
Published: June 2017

During the Victorian period literary publishing expanded greatly in volume and formats. Several factors contributed to these developments: technological improvements to book production, legal changes, and the growth of a reading public. Publishers evolved into the organizers of a trade that included negotiating with authors, managing production, and selling the works. Literary works appeared in a number of diverse formats, each directed at a particular segment of the market: expensive formats intended for circulating libraries catered to the middle classes; inexpensive magazines aimed at a broad audience; and penny papers fed an emerging mass market.
Realism
Authors: Patten Robert L.
Published: June 2017

Given that there were a wide variety of theories about what constituted the real, there were at least four categories of realism that nineteenth‐century Britons postulated and, at various times, ascribed to. These were linguistic realism, subject realism, scientific and sociological realism, and critical realism. (1) Linguistic realism was the dedication, starting with Wordsworth, to use the language that people spoke, rather than any artificial “literary” construct. (2) Subject realism, which dominated the century, derived from the claim that a particular class, location, activity, or situation – for example the poor, manufacturing towns, sex, illness – had never before been depicted faithfully. (3) Scientific and sociological realism was often grounded in materialistic, deterministic philosophies holding that human lives were governed by heredity and environment. Literature could only be considered realistic if it showed things as they really were, without such romantic inventions as transcendent moments and providential accidents. Especially for the lower classes, “real” life was Hobbesian, “nasty, brutish, and short”: ends could be predicted from the beginning. And, like a scientist, the writer had to be dispassionate, a neutral observer without bias or predisposition to perceive subjectively. (4) Finally, toward the end of the century, critical realists began foregrounding the conventions of their art, countering the claims of realism by recognizing that we believe things to be real because they conform to the constructions (plot, character, settings, narrative strategies) of the realistic genres we have been taught express truth.
Robins, Elizabeth
Authors: Miller Renata Kobetts
Published: June 2017

Known to theater historians and critics as an actress and theater‐manager who was a standard‐bearer for the works of Ibsen in England, Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952) was also a translator, novelist, essayist, playwright, and suffragette. While theater and women's rights are central keynotes to understanding Robins, her work, in many ways, crossed boundaries as she moved between nations, translated from one language to another, worked in multiple genres and adapted fiction for the stage, and forged collaborative relationships. Although Robins has been an important figure for theater historians and feminist literary critics, her work is notable for challenging the limits of genre and gender.
Russia
Authors: McLean Thomas
Published: June 2017

Most Britons regarded Russia as an expanding empire and a growing threat. Romantic and Victorian literature tended to sustain rather than challenge these representations. Britain's opponent on the eastern question and on the Great Game, Russia featured regularly in occasional verse and political pamphlets, but only a few major poets and novelists attempted to create complex Russian characters. Significantly, many of the most vociferous critics of Russia were either Scottish or Irish writers, who perhaps saw similarities between Russia's oppression of its neighbors and England's treatment of Scotland and Ireland. A more complex image of Russia appeared in the final years of the Victorian era, as increasing numbers of Russian exiles and immigrants arrived in Britain, and the great works of nineteenth‐century Russian literature received belated English translations.
Rutherford, Mark (William Hale White)
Authors: Dentith † Simon
Published: June 2017

Mark Rutherford was the pseudonym of William Hale White (1831–1913), civil servant, journalist, and novelist, best known for novels published in the 1880s and 1890s dealing with issues of faith, doubt, and spiritual struggle. The novels include fictionalized autobiography and feature White's own dissenting background in provincial England.
Poetry, working‐class
Authors: Boos Florence
Published: June 2017

The coherence of Victorian working‐class poetry as a category reflects the extent to which many working‐class poets attempted to speak on behalf of a group or to express commonly shared experiences. In addition, working‐class writing of this era is marked by several overlapping features: the influence of an oral tradition and dialect poetry; the pervasiveness of Chartist and other political verse; poetry by women and by members of specific occupational groups; and the effect of improved education on the nature of self‐identified “working‐class poetry.” While this literary territory has only been partly explored as of yet, the study of Victorian proletarian literature has recently benefited from newly available resources and from exciting reconsiderations of its range and characteristics.
Science writers, male
Authors: Bivona Daniel
Published: June 2017

Science writing in the nineteenth century was a fast‐growing industry, helped along by a growing public fascination with – and ambivalence about – science and scientific discoveries. Although there were a number of important and influential female science writers in the period, women were, until the end of the century, generally denied the honorific title of “scientist,” as they were denied access to scientific education until late in the century. To speak inclusively of male science writing in the period, then, one must include both major publications by practicing scientists (some of which were bestsellers in the period) and the writings of popularizers who fed this increasing fascination with the wonders of science among a growing audience. Ultimately the story of male science writing in the nineteenth century is about (1) the struggle to consolidate a new professional grouping of scientists, invested with the intellectual authority to pronounce on “scientific” subjects; and (2) the oftentimes fierce resistance to the claims to authority that professionalization provoked.
Slavery
Authors: Lee Julia Sun‐Joo
Published: June 2017

In 1807 Parliament abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire. In 1833 it abolished the institution of slavery. The nation, which had been one of the world's slave powers in the previous century, now remade itself into a global antislavery policeman. Over the next several decades, Victorian writers confronted the legacy of Atlantic slavery in the British colonies and also redirected their focus to slavery in the United States, which would not be abolished until the 1860s, with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865).
Spasmodics
Authors: Rudy Jason R.
Published: June 2017

The 1840s and early 1850s in Britain saw the rise of a popular form of dramatic lyricism by authors that included Alexander Smith, Sydney Dobell, Philip James Bailey, Richard Hengist Horne, and others. Called “spasmodic,” these poems were largely well received at first, and subsequently highly criticized. Both the poems and their tumultuous reception speak to the shifting aesthetic and cultural values of the mid‐Victorian period.
Science
Authors: Rauch Alan
Published: June 2017

Scientific inquiry was a cornerstone of British literature from the Romantic period on, and many of the early works of science remained influential throughout the Victorian period. Scientific awareness increased through the Victorian age only as a result of the increase in children's texts, general periodicals, and popular introductions. Literary style also counted for a great deal in science and many authors, including Darwin, achieved renown for both style and content. Despite the growing professionalization of science, literary authors remained informed and concerned about new discoveries and challenging theories of the physical world.
Travel literature
Authors: Linley Margaret
Published: June 2017

The rise of travel writing and its contribution to knowledge generally and literary writing specifically is a defining characteristic of the nineteenth century, an era whose newly mobile citizens loved to go places. As actual travel became more accessible to a broader spectrum of the population, the idea of travel coalesced into a dominant Victorian metaphor for the workings of the imagination and figured as a powerful vehicle for moving readers, intellectually and emotionally, to other worlds. The expansion of the British Empire provided the major impetus for the Victorian outpouring of travel writing. Along with growing audiences eager to learn about faraway places, there was also an explosion in the range of travelers who recorded their exploits. In studying this body of writing, scholarship has focused on three distinct figures that emerged on the Victorian landscape: the explorer, the tourist, and the traveler.
Novel, verse
Authors: Markovits Stefanie
Published: June 2017

Many mid‐century poets attempted to modernize epic in response to the rise of the novel and the perceived cultural marginalization of poetry. The result was a distinctively Victorian literary form: the verse novel. While poets had long experimented with generic combinations, Victorian writers self‐consciously used the generic indeterminacy of the verse novel to contest social as well as literary norms, expressing a broad range of cultural concerns that prominently included anxieties surrounding gender and marriage. Poets also turned to the hybrid form to try to resolve tensions between the novelistic – present, objective, real – and the poetic – past, subjective, ideal. But the verse novel's main legacy lies in the fracturing of form and in the fusions of genre that characterize high modernism.
Technology
Authors: Brown Susan
Published: June 2017

This entry summarizes the extent and nature of technological developments in the Victorian period, and describes the advances in printing and paper technologies that led to the increase in periodical and illustrated literature which established a mass print culture. It links the symbolic role of the railway to the introduction of industrialized temporality that influenced much writing, including serialized fiction, and was associated with an increasingly commodified society. Realism is relevant to a range of technologies, including in the theater, and in tension with the paradoxical relationship between technology and the uncanny as well as the permeable boundaries between bodies and machines. The entry concludes by noting the extent to which Victorians’ ambivalence about technologies persists in our own disciplinary frameworks.
Wilde, Oscar
Authors: Powell Kerry
Published: June 2017

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), all too rarely taken seriously in his own time, has become one of the most important Victorians today. His criticism, fiction, and plays offer a penetrating critique and portrait of his time and yet are distinctively modern in their thought and expression. He challenged rigid Victorian codes of gender and sexuality and in doing so offered a more liberal interpretation of masculine and feminine while embodying a then unspeakable same‐sex love, “the love that dare not speak its name,” as he famously named it when on trial for “gross indecency” in 1895. Found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison at hard labor, Wilde would become a martyr for the modern gay movement – “St. Oscar,” as critic Terry Eagleton has styled him. Although a prisoner near the end, the hallmark of Wide's life and work was pure freedom, unbounded by social or moral compulsion. Anticipating contemporary critical theory, Wilde conceptualized human life as a performance and ourselves as the artists of our own lives, realizing the highest potential within us on our own terms.
Wilde, Oscar, journalism
Authors: Turner Mark W.
Published: June 2017

Like so many of the most well‐known nineteenth‐century authors we read and study today, Oscar Wilde was a journalist. While his journalism – largely reviews of books – tends not to be extensively read today, it was his primary literary labor throughout the 1880s, before the period of his success as a playwright in the early 1890s. In addition to writing numerous anonymous reviews for a variety of periodicals and newspapers, Wilde was also editor of the monthly magazine,
The Woman's World
, which ventured to reimagine popular women's reading.
Yonge, Charlotte
Authors: Hager Kelly
Published: June 2017

Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823–1901) was a Victorian writer associated with the Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church. She wrote a popular series of
romans‐fleuves
that chronicle the domestic lives of upper‐class families and their efforts to live lives of faith and service, as well as historical fiction, textbooks, biographies, periodical essays, and a conduct book for young Victorian gentlewomen,
Womankind
. She founded and edited the
Monthly Packet
, a journal for Anglican girls, from 1851 to 1893; she donated most of the proceeds of her work to missionaries of the Church.
Zangwill, Israel
Authors: Rochelson Meri‐Jane
Published: June 2017

Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was a Jewish writer and activist whose career spanned the late Victorian era and early twentieth century. He is best remembered for his fiction about Anglo‐Jewish life, most notably his novel
Children of the Ghetto
(1892), and his play
The Melting Pot
(1908). In his time, he was also a prolific and admired author of short fiction on both the Jewish experience and more general subjects, as well as novels on contemporary subjects, written mostly in the period 1888–1907. In the twentieth century he turned his attention to drama, much of it commenting on the tense prewar condition of Europe as well as social mores, and to activism on behalf of the British women's suffrage movement, Zionism, and the Jewish Territorial Organization, which he founded, in search of a state with Jewish autonomy wherever one might be found.
Gothic
Authors: Wolfreys Julian
Published: June 2017

Gothic is a notoriously difficult term to define, a genre that changes constantly and resists easy comprehension. Despite this there are numerous features that recur over more than a century in a large number of texts that can either be considered Gothic or to have been influenced by Gothic. Gothic, in part, is therefore definable according to the ways in which it and its key images, metaphors, and tropes become redefined according to cultural, social, and historical specificity. Moreover, Gothic is always about identity and the self. It demonstrates to the reader who he or she is in moments of crisis, while addressing also a greater sense of historical crisis that gives a context to the form of the Gothic.
Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Magic
Authors: Moro Pamela A.
Published: June 2017

Witchcraft, sorcery, and magic relate to encounters with and attempts to control the supernatural. Magic encompasses beliefs and behaviors in which the relationship between an act and its effect involves analogy or a mystical connection. As used by anthropologists, the term “witch” identifies someone alleged to practice socially prohibited forms of magic, while “sorcerer” refers to someone who intentionally takes on the role of magical practitioner, often with the intent to harm. Anthropological studies of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery around the world date to the mid‐nineteenth century and have been pursued through several schools of thought in the discipline. The most influential studies have been based on fieldwork in Africa and Melanesia. Most anthropologists see connections between witchcraft, sorcery, and social tensions, erupting from conflicts inherent in social organization or in response to modernity and social change.
N
eanderthals, Biosocial Models of
Authors: de Groote Isabelle
Published: June 2017

Neanderthals lived successfully in Europe and western Asia during the Middle Paleolithic period. Through the study of biological variables, it has been possible to shed light on the social life of Neanderthals. They led strenuous lives that involved hunting large game and gathering plant foods in order to meet the high energetic demands of life in their ever‐changing cold climate. Neanderthals lived in small bands of between ten and twenty adults along with their children. Genetic evidence has suggested that the females moved away whereas the males remained in their home band.
African Literature in French
Authors: Curto Roxanna Nydia
Published: June 2017

Under the Second Republic (1870–1914), France extended its educational system to the colonies, where subjects were required to learn to read and write French, and to study the most canonical works of French literature. In the early to mid‐twentieth century, a corpus of literary texts emerged, written in French, by authors from the colonies originally educated in France's republican system. This corpus is usually divided geographically into two categories: writings from North Africa, or the “Maghreb” (the term used to denote the region comprising Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia); and those from sub‐Saharan Africa. The first part of this entry focuses on North Africa, including works by writers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from the early twentieth century to the present. The second section focuses on sub‐Saharan Africa, from the first works of the early 1920s and the Negritude movement, to the 1950s novels recounting life under French colonialism to the post‐independence novels of the 1960s and 1970s, and the erotic and political works of the 1980s.
Armah, Ayi Kwei
Authors: Brown Michelle Lynn
Published: June 2017

Ayi Kwei Armah (b. 1939) is a Ghanaian novelist, essayist, scholar, and short story writer. He is best known for his historical fiction depicting the advent of the Arabic and European slave trades in West Africa and the deleterious effects of colonialism and neocolonialism on African individuals, economies, institutions, and cultures. A pan‐Africanist, Armah's work depicts the ancient connections among African communities and exposes divisions imposed or exacerbated by colonialism. His influence on contemporary African literature began with his scathing 1968 critique of neocolonial corruption,
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
and the 1973 epic
Two Thousand Seasons
. His graphic fictional depictions of racialized, gendered violence sparked critical discussions of African literary conventions and historical precedent that became part of the early processes of shaping the theoretical foundations of postcolonial studies. Armah currently works as a speaker, translator, and Africana scholar, and, with Per Ankh, established a collective dedicated to publishing and promoting African creative and scholarly writing.
Bandung Conference
Authors: Örnek Cangül
Published: June 2017

In April 1955 Indonesia hosted representatives from 29 African and Asian states to discuss decolonization and world peace. The aim was to promote cooperation in the Afro‐Asian region. The Bandung Conference heralded the emergence of a new pole in the Cold War that would alter the existing power of balance in the world politics. As the first large‐scale manifestation of nascent Afro‐Asian identity and interracial solidarity, it is acknowledged as a remarkable moment in the history of postcolonial communities. Despite divisions among participants, which were initially evident in their international commitments, the conference succeeded in stimulating the idea of postcolonial collective identity and interracial connection. The Afro‐Asian solidarity fell apart in the years that followed, but the conference contributed to forging out the concept of “nonalignment,” which would mark the subsequent course of the Cold War.
Biopolitics in Latin America
Authors: Nemser Daniel
Published: June 2017

Biopolitics is a key category for analyzing the mechanisms and techniques of governance in postcolonial Latin America, especially as they relate to race, nation, and ongoing forms of colonialism. Michel Foucault first laid out the concept in 1976, the year that
The History of Sexuality
,
Vol
.
1
was first published in French and he delivered the lectures of
Society Must Be Defended
at the Collège de France.
Brazilian Cultural Theory
Authors: Cevasco Maria Elisa
Published: June 2017

At least since the Proclamation of Independence in 1822, the cultural debate in Brazil has been locked, predictably, in two inescapable, though false, questions: should the new country have a culture of its own, our should it imitate the “genuine culture” that came, in the nineteenth century, from Europe and later one from the United States? This entry offers an overview of cultural theory in Brazil with special emphasis on the dialectical tradition.
Cabral, Amílcar
Authors: Harnoncourt Julia
Published: June 2017

Amílcar Cabral (1921–73) played a key role in the liberation struggle against the Portuguese colonial system in Guinea‐Bissau and Cape Verde. He became internationally known as one of the founders of the PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde) and wrote globally received texts on colonialism, imperialism, and the anti‐colonial struggle.
Caribbean Literature in French
Authors: Walcott‐Hackshaw Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

One of the most prolonged discussions among Francophone Caribbean writers and theorists has been the question of French Caribbean identity and subjectivity. Even within the context of the twenty‐first century, questions of definition, identification, and designation remain political and cultural issues as a result of the continued affiliation with France. Thus the notion of a “Caribbean literature in French” is in itself a postcolonial problem. The literary production of the Francophone region has to a great extent, particularly in the case of Martinique, been shaped by ideological, cultural, and political debates. Many Martinican writers have attempted to define and articulate a cultural identity within the political context of a French overseas department. The literature and theoretical works produced by these writers have gone beyond the regional boundaries to inform international postcolonial debates on difference, displacement, creolization, and cultural polyvalence.
Césaire, Aimé
Authors: Curtius Anny Dominique
Published: June 2017

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) is a world‐acclaimed Martinican poet, playwright, essayist, and politician, and the author of a seminal epic poem
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
(
Notebook of a Return to My Native Land
). He coined the concept
négritude
, which became a pioneering black consciousness movement in the 1930s in Paris. This entry highlights the major characteristics of his literary contributions and his political aura that have marked generations of scholars in postcolonial and diaspora studies, and constituted a fertile ground for movements of decolonization, political agency and identity formation in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries.
Chatterjee, Upamanyu
Authors: Ramamoorthy Rakesh
Published: June 2017

Upamanyu Chatterjee is an Indian English writer whose works deal with the uneasy coexistence of native traditions and Western modernity in postcolonial India. His writings are characterized by an ironic treatment of postcoloniality, and dark, irreverent humor. His works to date consist of six novels –
English
,
August: An Indian Story
,
The Last Burden
,
The Mammaries of the Welfare State
,
Weight Loss
,
Way to Go
, and
Fairy Tales at Fifty
– and a few short stories. The major concerns of his novels include the role of English language and literature in contemporary India, the institution of the Hindu middle‐class family, the nature of filial relationships, and the sexual obsessions of the protagonists. He satirizes the idiosyncrasies and the corruption of the bureaucracy, presents a harshly realistic account of contemporary Indian middle‐class life, and boldly depicts sexual themes and homosexuality.
Chinese Culture and Society
Authors: Vukovich Daniel F.
Published: June 2017

This entry discusses China's – the late Qing's to especially the People's Republic's – difficult, different, but still compelling relation to orientalism, nationalism, and colonial as well as modern discourse and politics. It also examines the case against postcolonial studies for China (as opposed to South Asia), and also the relations within a shared global history, including the geo‐politics of knowledge, and the opportunities for postcolonial or anti‐imperial studies of/and the mainland.
Cinema in Latin America
Authors: Gronemann Claudia
Published: June 2017

This entry traces the history of Hispano‐American cinema by analyzing the main patterns and epochs from its very beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century. As a postcolonial (in the historical sense) media technology, cinema developed in Latin America very specifically and metamorphosed from a popular practice of national imageries into a multicontextual and global media nowadays. This process did not progress as coherent but ran through highs and lows, through different phases of national recovery or decline due to political, economic, and cultural factors as explained here.
Cliff, Michelle
Authors: Cummings Ronald
Published: June 2017

This entry offers a brief biographical discussion of Jamaican‐American writer Michelle Cliff as well as examines the major themes and formal strategies evident in her writing. It discusses Cliff's novels, poetry, essays and short fiction situating them within the broader political concerns and narrative strategies of postcolonial writing.
Colonialism
Authors: Francuski Biljana Djoric , Todorovic Ivana
Published: June 2017

This entry provides a definition and a compact history of European colonialism, as the major political and economic phenomenon of the New Era. The entry covers the topics of the reasons for the foundation of colonial empires, the stages in their development, and finally the factors that led to their fall, as well as a brief overview of the global impact of colonialism.
Condé, Maryse
Authors: Vété‐Congolo Hanétha
Published: June 2017

Maryse Condé is probably the leading woman writer of the French Caribbean. Born in Guadeloupe, she has lived on three continents and produced in four decades an impressive number of literary texts in all genres, includingI Tituba,Black Witch of Salem,The Children of Segu, andWho Slashed Célanire's Throat?.
Creolization and
Créolité
Authors: Adlai Murdoch H.
Published: June 2017

The concept of creolization covers a number of key areas, including transnationalism, multiculturalism, diversity,
métissage
, and hybridization. Its origins lie in the interrelated processes of colonization, slavery, and migration that brought the New World into being. It originally referred to a European or an African subject displaced by place rather than race, along with the Creole languages that first appeared on slave plantations. These languages combined a European acrolect with a range of African basilects, joining these grammatical features to a relexification of colonial languages.

Creolization, then, defines cultures and identities in constant transformation. Today, creolization focuses on the growing intensity of global migration, and the intersection and interaction of majority and minority cultures across national boundaries. Ultimately, creolization should be understood as an unending, fluid process that cannot be reduced to a single path or principle, and it emphasizes the unpredictable results of cultural contact.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi
Authors: Dodgson‐Katiyo Pauline
Published: June 2017

Tsitsi Dangarembga is a Zimbabwean writer and filmmaker. Her early playwriting showed her commitment to exploring the role of women in society, a theme developed in her fiction. Her first novel,
Nervous Conditions
, has become a canonical text in African women's writing and is noted for its representation of women's oppression and resistance, and female sexuality. The sequel,
The Book of Not
describes a young woman's experiences at a white convent school and shows how she internalizes the racism she encounters. Dangarembga's first feature film was the development‐funded social issues film
Everyone's Child
; her more recent work such as
Kare Kare Zvako
has taken a more aesthetic and experimental approach.
Desani, G. V.
Authors: Abdul‐Majid Ruksana
Published: June 2017

G. V. Desani (Govindas Vishnoodas Desani, 1909–2000), journalist and author, is known principally for his unconventional and innovative novel,
All About H
.
Hatterr
(1948). An abiding cult classic with a singular publication history, the novel was revised and reprinted in several editions appearing across a span of almost 60 years. Lauded for his linguistic virtuosity, and frequently compared to James Joyce, Desani is most often granted originary status and located as a literary precursor – alongside R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao – to latter twentieth‐century Anglophone Indian writing. Widely acknowledged as an important nodal point in the evolution of the Indian English novel, Desani's novel made a lasting impression on subsequent generations of Indian writers.
Dussel, Enrique
Authors: Ramos Juan G.
Published: June 2017

Known for his contributions to philosophy of liberation, particularly as applied to ethics, political philosophy, history, and theology, Enrique Dussel is one of the most prominent Latin American philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. This entry traces Dussel's philosophical development from a re‐evaluation of history and theology in Latin America to a philosophy of liberation, particularly an ethics of liberation, as well as political philosophy in relation to globalization. Dussel has also done extensive work in related areas by presenting a critique of Marx's writing in connection to philosophy of liberation, as well as critiques on discourses on the idea of modernity from the perspective of the periphery. Since the 1960s, Dussel has sought to delineate the contours of a philosophy of liberation, while grounding his ideas in key fields (ethics, political philosophy, history, theology, phenomenology, political economy) and how these can lead to praxis of liberation.
Empire
Authors: Ganapathy‐Doré Geetha
Published: June 2017

Derived from Latin
imperium
, related to
imperare
“to command,” the term “empire” refers to “an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state,” according to the Oxford Dictionaries online. In the case of the British Empire, the modalities of extension took different forms, starting from small overseas possessions and trading posts, through colonies and dominions, not to mention protectorates and mandates, and developing into a vast empire on which the sun never set. The territorial dimension of empire is closely linked to the centrality and hegemony of its power. The sphere of influence of an empire may exceed its sheer geographical scope and time frame.
Constitution in Latin America
Authors: Rudan Paola
Published: June 2017

A postcolonial history of the concept of “constitution” in Latin America should set out from the fundamental laws enacted to regulate the newly independent states, looking at the influence of constitutional precedents such as those of the United States, France, or Cádiz. This historical analysis does not aim to read the Latin American constitutional experience along the path of “constitutionalism,” conceived as the progressive expansion of individual rights against the abuse of political power. Rather, it will question this progressive history by showing how the colonial past survived both after independence and within Latin American political modernity. Following this analytical path, the nature of constitutionalism as an “ordering discourse” will emerge, and the continuity between “constitutional colonialism” – the coercive and disciplinary legal, institutional, and social techniques of imperial domination – and the modern constitutional orders of Latin American States will be pointed out by speaking of a “colonial constitutionalism.”
Fanon, Frantz
Authors: Gibson Nigel C.
Published: June 2017

Author of
Black Skin, White Masks
,
A Dying Colonialism
, and
The Wretched of the Earth
, and active in the Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon became an important intellectual of decolonization. Since his death in 1961 his work continues to influence social movements and intellectual currents.
Fernández Retamar, Roberto
Authors: Gonzales Carlos
Published: June 2017

Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930) is the embodiment of the intellectual actively engaged in the leadership of his country. Retamar is considered to be a great poet and essayist; however, his essays have received more critical attention than his poems. The Cuban Revolution (1959) provided the context for his political affiliation and intellectual associations as well as for his poetic and essayistic production. In fact in “Calibán,” his most renowned essay, Retamar is inspired by Shakespeare's
The Tempest
(1611) and concentrates on one character: Caliban. The main purpose of “Calibán” was to give voice to the Spanish American resentment against the neocolonial attitude of the United States. He has continued to be an advocate for the cause of the oppressed in his writings as well as in his political activities.
Ferré, Rosario
Authors: Weldt‐Basson Helene C.
Published: June 2017

Rosario Ferré is Puerto Rico's most famous contemporary writer. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, short stories, and essays, as well as several novels. Ferré's early work, notably the collection of short stories
Papeles de Pandora
(1976), stands out for its feminist stance, while later works, such as
Maldito amor
(1989) and
Vuelo del cisne
(2002), although continuing this critical vein, focus on United States imperialism in Puerto Rico and thus have a postcolonial bent. Recently Ferré has been criticized for her shift from support for independence to statehood. Her work, rich in symbols and narrative ambiguity, has earned her a place among Latin America's most important writers.
German Empire
Authors: Hesse Isabelle
Published: June 2017

Germany only became a colonial power at the end of the nineteenth century, but it was soon the fourth largest empire of its time. Its first colonies were acquired in 1884 and relinquished after World War I in 1919. Germany's colonial expansion was mainly centered on the African continent, with colonies in today's Burundi, Cameroon, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Togo. Other German territories included Shandong province in China as well as Samoa, New Guinea, and a number of smaller Pacific Islands. However, scholarly attention to Germany's colonial past only emerged in the 1960s, and it was not until the 1980s that colonialism was placed in a comparative framework with Germany's Nazi past, examining the ways in which German imperialism influenced Hitler and Nazi ideology, particularly ideas of race and space in relation to the expansion in the East and genocidal practices during World War II.
Gramsci, Antonio
Authors: Frassinelli Pier Paolo
Published: June 2017

Antonio Gramsci was one of the most original and influential Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the last few decades his writings have also contributed to shape the theoretical and political agendas of emergent fields of inquiry such as cultural and postcolonial studies.
Griot
Authors: Jansen Jan
Published: June 2017

Griots are famous for their word art, their historical knowledge, and their music. In the twentieth century they gained prestige for imbuing the colonial and postcolonial states of West Africa with a historical dimension. They also secured a firm position in the international world music scene. The current crisis of the nation‐state has negatively impacted their role in African societies, while benefiting traditional hunters, nowadays celebrated as Africa's proto‐democrats.
Hall, Stuart
Authors: Alexander Claire
Published: June 2017

Stuart McPhail Hall (1932–2014) was one of the foremost figures in the theorization of race, ethnicity, and postcolonial studies. This entry maps some of the key transitions in Hall's intellectual career from the development of cultural studies, through his work on left politics in Britain, to his paradigm‐shifting work on “new ethnicities” and postcolonial identities.
Harris, Wilson
Authors: Niblett Michael
Published: June 2017

Wilson Harris is a Guyanese author whose fiction, poetry, and critical essays have established him as a highly influential and distinctive voice in the fields of Caribbean literature and postcolonial studies. Born in Guyana in 1921, he has produced 23 novels, stretching from
Palace of the Peacock
in 1960 to
The Ghost of Memory
in 2006. His work is characterized by a densely poetic, anti‐realist literary style and an emphasis on the redemptive potential of the imagination. In addition to his novels, his important theoretical writings on creolization and cross‐culturalism have provoked much discussion in postcolonial studies. More recently, his emphasis on the mutually constitutive relationship between human and extra‐human natures has drawn attention from the field of postcolonial ecocriticism.
Hegemony
Authors: Orihuela Sharada Balachandran
Published: June 2017

“Hegemony” very broadly refers to forms of indirect rule that take shape through nonviolent means. The use of this critical term was popularized by Antonio Gramsci. Violence does not fall away under hegemony, but rather coexists with other nonviolent forms of domination. Culture is integral to the replication of power under the Gramscian model of hegemony. Furthermore, hegemony is not purely coercive but, rather, depends on consent for replication. A range of Marxist and postcolonial critics in the South Asian and Latin American contexts took up this term in the late twentieth century. These critics include Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, Néstor García Canclini, the Subaltern Studies Group, and, later, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group.
Hegemony in Latin America
Authors: Dove Patrick
Published: June 2017

This entry discusses the conceptual development of hegemony theory from Marx through Gramsci to Laclau, with specific focus on the theory's reception in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. In addition to describing the salient commonalities and differences between Marx, Gramsci, and Laclau, the entry also explores the presumed strengths and possible weaknesses of hegemony theory in its capacity to account for the social as totality without losing sight of heterogeneity or reducing it to mere difference. The entry concludes by asking questions about Laclau's recent participation in the Kirchner regimes in Argentina as a public intellectual of the state.