In the first book to consider British suburban literature from the vantage point of imperial and postcolonial studies, Todd Kuchta argues that suburban identity is tied to the empire’s rise and fall. He takes his title from the type of home synonymous with suburbia. Like the semi-detached house, which joins separate dwellings under one roof, suburbia and empire were geographically distinct but imaginatively linked. Yet just as the "semi" conceals two homes behind a single façade, suburbia’s apparent uniformity masks its defining oppositions—between country and city, "civilization" and "savagery," master and slave. While some people saw the suburbs as homegrown colonies, others viewed them as a terra incognita beyond the pale of British culture. Surveying a range of popular and canonical texts, Kuchta reveals the suburban foundations of a variety of unexpected fictional locales: the Thames Valley of H. G. Wells’s Martian attack and the gaslit London of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but also the tropical backwaters of Joseph Conrad’s Malay Archipelago and the imperial communities of Raj fiction by E. M. Forster and George Orwell. This capacious view demonstrates suburbia's vital role in science fiction, detective tales, condition-of-England novels, modernist narratives of imperial decline, and contemporary multicultural fiction. Drawing on postcolonial theory, urban studies, and architectural scholarship, this book will appeal to readers interested in Victorian, modern, and contemporary British literature and cultures, especially those concerned with how place shapes class and masculine identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Inner Empire explores the impact of imperial cultures on the landscapes and urban environments of the British Isles from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth century. It asserts that Britain’s four-hundred year entanglement with global empire left its mark upon the British Isles as much as it did the wider world. Buildings stood as one of the most conspicuous manifestations of the myriad relationships that Britain maintained with the theory and practice of colonialism in its modern history. Divided into two main sections, the volume’s content considers ‘internal’ colonisation and its infrastructures of control, order, and suppression, alongside wider relationships between architecture, the imperial economy, and cultural identity. Taken together, the essays in this volume present for the first time a coherent analysis of the British Isles as an imperial setting understood through its buildings, spaces, and infrastructure.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes, including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics, including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (on "Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology," "Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief," and "Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures"), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own "lead" essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of "literary" culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and established scholars.

This book examines the emergence of modern company towns in Iran by delineating the architectural, political, and industrial histories of three distinct resource-based ‘company town’ projects built in association with the ‘Big Three’ powers of World War II. The book’s narrative builds upon a tripartite research design that chronologically traces the formation and development of the oil, steel, and copper industries, respectively favoured by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States in this part of the world. By applying three sets of comparative studies, the book provides critical vantage points to three different ideological design paradigms: postcolonial regionalism, socialist universalism, and rationalist modern nation building. From a global political context, the book contributes to the disclosure of new information about the geopolitical confrontation of these three nations in the Global South to increase their sphere of influence after the Second World War. Furthermore, it demonstrates how postwar architectural modernism was adopted by each power and adapted to their ideological mind frame to fulfil distinct social, cultural, political, and economic targets. This book examines multiple interconnections between architecture, politics, and industrial development by adopting a transdisciplinary approach based on comprehensive fieldwork, site surveys, and the analysis of original multilingual documents. As such, it will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, history, international relations, and Middle Eastern studies.

Craft practice has a rich history and remains vibrant, sustaining communities while negotiating cultures within local or international contexts. More than two centuries of industrialization have not extinguished handmade goods; rather, the broader force of industrialization has redefined and continues to define the context of creation, deployment and use of craft objects. With object study at the core, this book brings together a collection of essays that address the past and present of craft production, its use and meaning within a range of community settings from the Huron Wendat of colonial Quebec to the Girls? Friendly Society of twentieth-century England. The making of handcrafted objects has and continues to flourish despite the powerful juggernaut of global industrialization, whether inspired by a calculated refutation of industrial sameness, an essential means to sustain a cultural community under threat, or a rejection of the imposed definitions by a dominant culture. The broader effects of urbanizing, imperial and globalizing projects shape the multiple contexts of interaction and resistance that can define craft ventures through place and time. By attending to the political histories of craft objects and their makers, over the last few centuries, these essays reveal the creative persistence of various hand mediums and the material debates they represented.

J. G. Ballard once declared that the most truly alien planet is Earth and in his science fiction he abandoned the traditional imagery of rocket ships traveling to distant galaxies to address the otherworldliness of this world. The Empires of J. G. Ballard is the first extensive study of Ballard's critical vision of nation and empire, of the political geography of this planet. Paddy examines how Ballard s self-perceived status as an outsider and exile, the Sheppertonian from Shanghai, generated an outlook that celebrated worldliness and condemned parochialism. This book brings to light how Ballard wrestled with notions of national identity and speculated upon the social and psychological implications of the post-war transformation of older models of empire into new imperialisms of consumerism and globalization. Presenting analyses of Ballard s full body of work with its tales of reverse colonization, psychological imperialism, the savagery of civilization, estranged Englishmen abroad and at home, and multinational communities built on crime, The Empires of J. G. Ballard offers a fresh perspective on the fiction of J. G. Ballard. The Empires of J.G. Ballard: An Imagined Geography offers a sustained and highly convincing analysis of the imperial and post-imperial histories and networks that shape and energise Ballard's fictional and non-fictional writings. To what extent can Ballard be considered an international writer? What happens to our understanding of his post-war science fictions when they are opened up to the language and logics of post-colonialism? And what creative and critical roles do the spectres of empire play in Ballard's visions of modernity? Paddy follows these and other fascinating lines of enquiry in a study that is not only essential reading for Ballard students and scholars, but for anyone interested in the intersections of modern and contemporary literature, history and politics. (Jeanette Baxter, Anglia Ruskin University) Shanghai made my father. Arriving in England after WW2, he was a person of the world who d witnessed extremes of human experience, and remained the outsider observing life from his home in Shepperton. 1930s Shanghai, Paris of the East , was a mix of international sophistication and violence, unfettered capitalism and acute poverty, American cars, martinis and Coca Cola, a place marked by death and war. It had a profound influence on my father and his imagination. Dr Paddy s fascinating book explores my father s fiction within an international context and offers a profound reading of a man who always kept his eyes and mind open to the world. (Fay Ballard)

The extraordinary influence of Scots in the British Empire has long been recognized. As administrators, settlers, temporary residents, professionals, plantation owners, and as military personnel, they were strikingly prominent in North America, the Caribbean, Australasia, South Africa, India, and colonies in South-East Asia and Africa. Throughout these regions they brought to bear distinctive Scottish experience as well as particular educational, economic, cultural, and religious influences. Moreover, the relationship between Scots and the British Empire had a profound effect upon many aspects of Scottish society. This volume of essays, written by notable scholars in the field, examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, in East India Company rule in India, migration and the preservation of ethnic identities, the environment, the army, missionary and other religious activities, the dispersal of intellectual endeavours, and in the production of a distinctive literature rooted in colonial experience. Making use of recent, innovative research, the chapters demonstrate that an understanding of the profoundly interactive relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the British Empire. All scholars and general readers interested in the dispersal of intellectual ideas, key professions, Protestantism, environmental practices, and colonial literature, as well as more traditional approaches to politics, economics, and military recruitment, will find it an essential addition to the historical literature.

Of all the great British rock bands to emerge from the 1960s, none had a stronger sense of place than the Kinks. Often described as the archetypal English band, they were above all a quintessentially working-class band with a deep attachment to London, particularly the patch of suburban North London where most of the members grew up. In this illuminating study, Mark Doyle examines the relationship between the Kinks and their city, from their early songs of teenage rebellion to their later album-length works of social criticism, providing a unique perspective on the way in which the band responded to the shifting nature of working-class life. Along the way, he finds fascinating and sometimes surprising connections with figures as diverse as Edmund Burke, John Clare, Charles Dickens, and the Covent Garden Community Association. More than just a book about the Kinks, this is a book about a city, a nation, and a social class undergoing a series of profound, sometimes troubling changes—and about a group of young men who found a way to describe, lament, and occasionally even celebrate those changes through song.

With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political history, the history of ideas, cultural history and art history, The Victorian World offers a sweeping survey of the world in the nineteenth century. This volume offers a fresh evaluation of Britain and its global presence in the years from the 1830s to the 1900s. It brings together scholars from history, literary studies, art history, historical geography, historical sociology, criminology, economics and the history of law, to explore more than 40 themes central to an understanding of the nature of Victorian society and culture, both in Britain and in the rest of the world. Organised around six core themes – the world order, economy and society, politics, knowledge and belief, and culture – The Victorian World offers thematic essays that consider the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies. A further section on ‘Varieties of Victorianism’ offers considerations of the production and reproduction of external versions of Victorian culture, in India, Africa, the United States, the settler colonies and Latin America. These thematic essays are supplemented by a substantial introductory essay, which offers a challenging alternative to traditional interpretations of the chronology and periodisation of the Victorian years. Lavishly illustrated, vivid and accessible, this volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the nineteenth century.