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Special Issue: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim
Guest editor: Tamara S. Wagner
Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2013
Victorian Literature and Culture seeks contributions to a special issue on The Pacific Rim, with a focus on its Victorian culture and Anglophone literature by regional writers as well as British settlers and travellers. Were the Victorians aware of the significance that the expanding settler empire, its intersection with that of other colonial powers, business routes across them, and increasingly also, critical representations of the imperialist metropole from the vantage point of emergent colonial centres had for nineteenth-century culture on a new, more global scale? How did they represent the area and geopolitical space that we have now come to know as the Pacific Rim? What were the effects of cultural exchanges on nineteenth-century music, architecture, art, museums, religion, literature, and on theories of the aesthetic or of culture at large? Did these effects change perceptions of the region and of the British Empire’s, or British presence’s, position within it?
To address the literature as well as the social and political issues of the Pacific Rim as a whole may have become a standard strategy in the discussion of contemporary politics and culture. Similarly, the study of nineteenth-century transatlanticism is now established as an acknowledged and continuously widening field. But how did the Victorians conceive of and describe travelling, doing business, and living in a diverse geopolitical region that encompasses such vastly different areas as the settler colonies of Australasia, the British Straits Settlements in Malaya and Singapore, the special status of Hong Kong, and the less formalised presence of the British in Japan or Korea?
This special issue extends the interdisciplinary, transnational analysis prompted by nineteenth-century transatlantic studies to the Pacific Rim. It invites analyses of the cultural developments and interchanges within the region as well as of the changing forms in which these developments manifested themselves in Victorian culture.
Please send inquiries and electronic submissions of full-length papers as attached word documents to tswagner at ntu.edu.sg. The completed papers should be formatted according to MLA style.
All papers will be reviewed by the special topics editor, as appropriate by members of the editorial board, and by the editors of _Victorian Literature and Culture,_ Adrienne Munich and John Maynard. For further information about the journal see
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/
