In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a ‘flattering illusion of concentric arrangement’. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot’s life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot’s career—from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such—Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot’s development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.
Although North America and Australasia occupy opposite ends of the earth, they have never been that far from each other conceptually. The United States and Australia both began as British colonies and mutual entanglements continue today, when contemporary cultures of globalization have brought them more closely into juxtaposition. Taking this transpacific kinship as his focus, Paul Giles presents a sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history to consider the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of U.S. literature. Early American writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow and Charles Brockden Brown found the idea of antipodes to be a creative resource, but also an alarming reminder of Great Britain's increasing sway in the Pacific. The southern seas served as inspiration for narratives by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. For African Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, Australia represented a haven from slavery during the gold rush era, while for E.D.E.N. Southworth its convict legacy offered an alternative perspective on the British class system. In the 1890s, Henry Adams and Mark Twain both came to Australasia to address questions of imperial rivalry and aesthetic topsy-turvyness. The second half of this study considers how Australia's political unification through Federation in 1901 significantly altered its relationship to the United States. New modes of transport and communication drew American visitors, including novelist Jack London. At the same time, Americans associated Australia and New Zealand with various kinds of utopian social reform, particularly in relation to gender politics, a theme Giles explores in William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Miles Franklin. He also considers how American modernism in New York was inflected by the Australasian perspectives of Lola Ridge and Christina Stead, and how Australian modernism was in turn shaped by American styles of iconoclasm. After World War II, Giles examines how the poetry of Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others was influenced by their direct experience of Australia. He then shifts to post-1945 fiction, where the focus extends from Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism and posthumanism (Salman Rushdie, Donna Haraway). Ranging from figures like John Ledyard to John Ashbery, from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Piccinini and J. M. Coetzee, Antipodean America is a truly epic work of transnational literary history.
In this second volume of The Antipodean Philosopher, Graham Oppy and N.N. Trakakis have brought together fourteen leading Australasian philosophers, inviting them to speak in a frank and accessible way about their philosophical lives: for example, what drew them to a career in philosophy, what philosophy means to them, and their perceptions and criticisms of the ways in which philosophy is studied and taught in Australia and New Zealand. The philosophers interviewed include Brian Ellis, Frank Jackson, Jeff Malpas, Alan Musgrave, Philip Pettit, Graham Priest, Peter Singer and Michael Smith – philosophers who have distinguished themselves in the discipline, both nationally and internationally, over many years and in various branches of philosophy. What emerges from the discussion with these philosophers is a distinctive and engaging narrative of the history of philosophy in Australasia, its recent successes and flourishing, and the problems and prospects facing it in the twenty-first century. These interviews will challenge and entertain anyone with an interest in contemporary philosophy and the challenges of living out the examined life today.
In this second volume of The Antipodean Philosopher, Graham Oppy and N.N. Trakakis have brought together fourteen leading Australasian philosophers, inviting them to speak in a frank and accessible way about their philosophical lives: for example, what drew them to a career in philosophy, what philosophy means to them, and their perceptions and criticisms of the ways in which philosophy is studied and taught in Australia and New Zealand. The philosophers interviewed include Brian Ellis, Frank Jackson, Jeff Malpas, Alan Musgrave, Philip Pettit, Graham Priest, Peter Singer and Michael Smith - philosophers who have distinguished themselves in the discipline, both nationally and internationally, over many years and in various branches of philosophy. What emerges from the discussion with these philosophers is a distinctive and engaging narrative of the history of philosophy in Australasia, its recent successes and flourishing, and the problems and prospects facing it in the twenty-first century. These interviews will challenge and entertain anyone with an interest in contemporary philosophy and the challenges of living out the examined life today.
This essay collection proposes that G.W.M. Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian print culture reveals the interrelations between authorship, genre, and radicalism in popular print culture of the nineteenth century. As a best-selling author of popular fiction marketed to the lower classes, and a passionate champion of radical politics and "the industrious classes," Reynolds and his work demonstrate the relevance of Victorian Studies to topics of pressing contemporary concern including populism, working-class fiction, the concept of ‘originality’, and the collective scholarly endeavour to ‘widen’ and ‘undiscipline’ Victorian Studies. Bringing together well-known and newly-emerging scholars from across different disciplinary perspectives, the volume explores the importance of Reynolds Studies to scholarship on the nineteenth-century. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the nineteenth-century press, popular culture, and of authorship, as well as to Victorian Studies scholars interested in the translation of Victorian texts into new and indigenous markets.
This book offers the first extended account of the mid-century rise of ‘model women of the press’: women who not only stormed the male bastions of social and political journalism but also presented themselves as upholders of the highest standards of professional journalistic practice. They broke the codes of anonymity in several ways, including signing articles in their own names and developing distinctly female personae. They proved, by example, women’s fitness for conventionally masculine lines of journalism. By placing Victorian women’s serious, high-minded journalism firmly within the context of ‘the widening sphere’ of female professions in mid-nineteenth-century England, the book shows how a wide range of women writers, including leading Victorian feminists and female reformers, contributed to the professionalization of women’s authorship. Drawing on extensive archival research and close analysis of a wide range of printed texts, from Victorian newspapers and periodicals to autobiographies, memoirs, and fiction, this book elucidates several aspects of Victorian women’s journalism that have been previously ignored: the market interest of the feminist English Woman’s Journal; the ability of women like Eliza Meteyard and Frances Power Cobbe to write consistently on serious social and political issues in mainstream periodicals; Harriet Ward’s astonishing reportage from the war fields of South Africa; and Harriet Martineau’s reports on Famine-devastated Ireland and her role as a transatlantic commentator on American abolitionism. The study also offers the first focused account of the figure of the female professional journalist in Victorian novels, showing how these texts move away from the dominant myth of the author as a solitary genius to present the female journalist as a collaborator who adapts her writing to fit various newspapers and periodicals, and works closely with male editors and peers. In examining the rise of the Victorian woman writer as a serious social and political journalist, this book adds to current critical understanding of female political expression, authorial agency, and cultural authority in nineteenth-century England.
This book examines the range of the colonial imaginary in Eliot’s works, from the domestic and regional to ancient and speculative colonialisms. It challenges monolithic, hegemonic views of George Eliot — whose novelistic career paralleled the creation of British India — and also dismissals of the postcolonial as ahistorical. It uncovers often-overlooked colonized figures in the novels. It also investigates Victorian Islamophobia in light of Eliot’s impatience with ignorance, intolerance, and xenophobia as well as her interrogation of the make-believe of endings. Drawing on a range of sources from Eugène Bodichon’s Algerian anthropological texts, the Persian journals of John Martyn, and postmodern re-engagements, Postcolonial George Eliot has implications for an understanding of the globalization of English, the decolonization of disciplinarity and periodization, and the roots of present-day conflict in the wider Mediterranean world.
