Commemorating the Crimean War: The Provenance and Symbolism of a British Medal of 1856

With the exception of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and its long ‘afterlife’ following the relocation at Sydenham of the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace which housed it, perhaps no other event during the Victorian era engendered such an extensive and varied material culture as the Crimean War (1854-6).[1] Medallists, ceramists, artists, and others commemorated the age-defining conflict fought by the allies – Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia – against Russia in a cornucopia of objects, many of which survive

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Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

The cross-cultural dialogue generated as a part of the discursive assimilation between the East and the West during the nineteenth century was not only textured and nuanced, but further reflected larger epistemological debates emerging from this socio-historic conflation of ideas. The question of ‘colonial modernity’, which gained currency in later critical writing, focusing on the multiplicity of ideological categories formed as a part of this discursive shift, certainly testifies to the transformative cultural landscape of the time period. Significant among

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Victorian legacies in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Strangers Child

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, London: Picador, 2011, 576 pages, £20 paperback, ISBN: 0330483242 Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger’s child; Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ I’ve just finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child. I bought it at the beginning of June in Cardiff after running a conference there on ‘Material Religion’. Exhausted and falling asleep on the train, I put it away

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