How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.

Special Focus editor: Natasha Lushetich Series editors: Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger, Klaus Stierstorfer Symbolism is cohesive. It gathers heterogeneity over time, across fields of human endeavor and systems of communication. Non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology, appear dissipative. Yet they are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being "is"; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as "the Eastern hill keeps running on the water"; at logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; or at paradoxical games like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with paddles that have huge holes in them. In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s "other." They catapult the mind into the realm of the extra-linguistic, the para-logical and the meta-experiential, or they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations. Forty years after Varela et al’s groundbreaking work on the embodied, emotional and environmentally embedded mind – that marked a definitive departure from its former strictly rational conception – there is a need to re-examine the territory that lies beyond mind for a different reason: the proliferation of algorithmic logics that rely on the idea of a rational agent (human or algorithmic) making logical, self-serving decisions. This special issue explores neither-rational-nor-irrational forms of thinking and making. It sketches a cartography of a-rational processes of meaning- and knowledge-production that operate across numerous sites, practices, and disciplines: visual and media art; literature; art history; music; dance; film; intermedia and photography. Part I "Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals" focuses on the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde and amodernism. Part II "Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds" investigates the ways in which the Derridian delays/detours and the Deleuzian folding function as concrete ways of embodied knowledge-production. Part III, "Immanent Transcendence", offers a glimpse into the reticular and iterative structuring of transcendence that does not pre-exist immanence but is its residue.

Both travel and translation involve a type of journey, one with literal and metaphorical dimensions. Judith Johnston brings together these two richly resonant modes of getting from here to there as she explores their impact on culture with respect to the work of Victorian women. Using the metaphor of the published journey, whether it involves actual travel or translation, Johnston focusses particularly on the relationships of various British women with continental Europe. At the same time, she sheds light on the possibility of appropriation and British imperial enhancement that such contact produces. Johnston's book is in part devoted to case studies of women such as Sarah Austin, Mary Busk, Anna Jameson, Charlotte Guest, Jane Sinnett and Mary Howitt who are representative of women travellers, translators and journalists during a period when women became increasingly robust participants in the publishing industry. Whether they wrote about their own travels or translated the foreign language texts of other writers, Johnston shows, women were establishing themselves as actors in the broad business of culture. In widening our understanding of the ways in which gender and modernity functioned in the early decades of the Victorian age, Johnston's book makes a strong case for a greater appreciation of the contributions nineteenth-century women made to what is termed the knowledge empire.

Contributors: Barbara Baird, Niklas Barke, Anna Bogic, Hayley Brown, Lori A. Brown, Cathrine Chambers, Ewelina Ciaputa, Gayle Davis, Mary Gilmartin, Agata Ignaciuk, Sinéad Kennedy, Lena Lennerhed, Jo-Ann MacDonald, Colleen MacQuarrie, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker, Christabelle Sethna, Sally Sheldon

Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health highlights the complex ways in which sexuality is expressed and enacted through local ideologies, global identities and material cultures, and their influence on people’s sexual health and well-being. Its impetus is the renewed interest in technology and the ‘social life of things,’ including pharmaceuticals, expanded sexual and related surgery, the growing exploitation of markets for sexual and contraceptive products, and the impact of these on sexual and health practices and outcomes. Organised loosely into three parts, the opening chapters concentrate on female contraception, its availability, and the varied cultural significance attached to the ability to control its use, exploring the politics of reproductive health and birth control, and the ties between technology and power. The middle section turns its attention to men, and the impact of traditional and contemporary concerns about masculinity, and the social and sexual roles of men. The final chapters look at the commonalities across cultural borders and sexual gendered identities – how products and procedures travel, not only through the formal channels of globalisation, but also informally, carried by individuals across cultural and social boundaries through sexual, social and commercial interactions. The volume brings together anthropologists, sociologists and cultural studies scholars, both senior and emerging, from around the globe. Offering an important and topical contribution to the developing global literature on sexuality, sexual identity, culture and health, it is of interest to researchers and advanced students in these areas.

Between January 1919 and March 1920, waves of Spanish flu swept across Australia, touching every settlement from the bottom of Tasmania to the tip of Cape York and from Byron Bay in the east to Broome in the west. At least 15,000 people died and many more were incapacitated, but medical and health specialists, by literally putting their lives on the line, saved countless more and gave Australia a template for what was to come at the country exactly a century later. This book tells the full story of the Australian experience of the Spanish Flu and of those who fought it and sometimes lost their lives to it. This fascinating account also illustrates many striking parallels to the Covid pandemic of 2020, including intense interstate rivalries, personal heroics, frequent confusion and incompetence, and widespread economic disruption.

Art Crossing Borders offers a thought-provoking analysis of the internationalisation of the art market during the long nineteenth century. Twelve experts, dealing with a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and commercial contexts, explore how the gradual integration of art markets structurally depended on the simultaneous rise of nationalist modes of thinking, in unexpected and ambiguous ways. By presenting a radically international research perspective Art Crossing Borders offers a crucial contribution to the field of art market studies.

A truly cosmopolitan Irish writer, George Moore (1852-1933) was a fascinating figure of the fin de siècle, moving between countries, crossing genre and medium boundaries, forever exploring and promulgating aesthetic trends and artistic developments: Naturalism in the novel and the theatre, Impressionism in painting, Decadence and the avant-garde, Literary Wagnerism, the Irish Literary Revival, New Woman culture. This volume on border-crossings offers a variety of critical perspectives to approach Moore’s multifaceted oeuvre and personality. The essays by Contributors from various national backgrounds and from a wide range of disciplines establish original points of contact between literary creation, art history, Wagnerian opera, gender studies, sociology, and altogether reposition Moore as a major representative of European turn-of-the-century culture.

Covering two hundred years, this groundbreaking book brings together essays on borderlands by leading experts in the modern history of the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia to offer the first historical study of borderlands with a global reach.

This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that ‘idleness’ is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of ‘the Victorians’ as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to ‘re-subjectification’ and the assertion of a ‘late-Romantic’ sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.