Tag: Politics

Mary Barton and the Politics of Translation in Maoist China

Other

Mary Barton occupies a special place in the history of English author Elizabeth Gaskell’s Chinese reception. It was the only Gaskell work to be translated into Chinese in Maoist China, and one of the most valued pieces of British literature at that time because of its direct engagement with sociopolitical themes of class conflict and labor struggles. The Chinese translation of Mary Barton was printed three times by different publishing houses during the Mao years and was included in the

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

Exhibitions, Other, Victorians on Display

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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“Writing Between the Lines”: Style as Walter Pater’s Esoteric Teaching of Queerness

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Walter Pater, late nineteenth-century aesthete, is sometimes considered a quietist lacking political engagement. Heather Love points out that Pater has been closely linked to the ills of aestheticism, in particular, political quietism. She challenges this view by proposing to read Pater’s works “not as a refusal of politics but rather as a politics of refusal”.[1] I argue that Pater is not only engaged in a “politics of refusal” but also covertly celebrates unorthodox queerness esoterically to ensure that his radical

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

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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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Books and Borders in the Atlantic World

Other

The nineteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world, although fractured by emergent national categories after 1776, continued to share a vibrant literary market united by language and trade.[1] Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were popular in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and James Fenimore Cooper was read and imitated on both sides of the Atlantic. British literature provided Canadian colonial writers with models to emulate and with iconic names to admire; Canadian book buyers dealt with American, as well as with British

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Venerating Verses and Disrespectful Ditties: Informal Music Inspired by Queen Victoria

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Over the course of her record breaking six-decade reign, Queen Victoria was the subject of numerous formal and informal musical compositions alike. While most formal music was reverential in nature and sought to praise the monarch, by and large the informal music that Victoria inspired among the lower classes tended to contain derogatory or mocking depictions of the queen. However, there were a small number of compositions that celebrated Victoria’s personal and political successes. Still, most of these were informal

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Words at War: Fiction and Critique Forged in Times and Spaces of Violence

Victorians Beyond the Academy

War occupies an uneasy place in literature and in the study of literature. Raymond Williams’s well-known observation about Jane Austen captures something of this dynamic: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen chose to ignore the decisive historical events of her time. Where […] are the Napoleonic wars: the real current of history?” (113). In posing this question, Williams makes war both central to, and beside the point of, the novel form. Today, the relationship between war and

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North American Democracies in the Victorian Era: The Political Satire of Th. Ch. Haliburton

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Throughout 2020, the world has been watching American democracy appearing to unravel as its Covid-19 pandemic spiralled out of control; the responsibility for public health measures devolved from the federal level to state level, then to county level, and ultimately down to individuals who pushed back in the name of freedom and challenged lockdowns in courts, and attempted to take over the US Capitol. Prudently, on March 31 Canada closed its southern border and is continuing to monitor the increasingly

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Sympathy in Public, Sympathy in Private: An Introduction to Novelist Edna Lyall in Two Parts (Part 1)

Other

Sympathy sold well in the late-nineteenth-century literary marketplace. When the novel We Two (1884) by Edna Lyall (pseudonym of Ada Ellen Bayly, 1857–1903) became an overnight sensation, Lyall cut a figure that was ready-made to slip into the role of sympathy spokesperson. Her career became a sympathetic enterprise in more than one sense. Not only did she write sensitively to ease myriad anxieties crowding the minds and lives of lower-middle-class readers; she also aspired to instill in readers a habitual

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Helen Kingstone, ‘Noiseless revolutions? The Victorian roots of Theresa May’s rhetoric’

Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Helen Kingstone is co-Deputy Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Leeds Trinity University. Her book Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: memory, history, fiction is forthcoming with Palgrave If you were tuning in to the UK news in early October, you would probably have heard snippets from Theresa May’s first Conservative Party conference speech as leader and Prime Minister. What might – or might not – have surprised you was how steeped it was

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