This study explores the cultural and political impact of Victorian travelers' descriptions of physical and verbal violence in Africa. Travel narratives provide a rich entry into the shifting meanings of colonialism, as formal imperialism replaced informal control in the Nineteenth century. Offering a wide-ranging approach to travel literature's significance in Victorian life, this book features analysis of physical and verbal violence in major exploration narratives as well as lesser-known volumes and newspaper accounts of expeditions. It also presents new perspectives on Olive Schreiner and Joseph Conrad by linking violence in their fictional travelogues with the rhetoric of humanitarian trusteeship.

Looking at travelogues, ethnographic monographs, consular reports, diaries and letters, sketches, photography and more, Burroughs examines eyewitness travel reports of atrocities committed in European-funded slave regimes in the Congo Free State, Portuguese West Africa, and the Putumayo district of the Amazon rainforest during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. As Burroughs articulates, as well as bringing home to readers ongoing brutalities, eyewitness narratives importantly contributed to debates on humanitarianism, trade, colonialism, and race and racial prejudice in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ combines a close reading of Morris’s work with historical and philosophical analysis in order to argue, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that his writings demonstrate an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle. The work examines Morris’s representations of violence in relation to the wider cultural preoccupations and political movements with which they intersect, including medievalism, Teutonism, and the visionary, fractured socialism of the ‘fin de siècle’.

Long popular with a general readership, travel writing has, in the past three decades or so, become firmly established as an object of serious and multi-disciplinary academic inquiry. Few of the scholarly and popular publications that have focused on the nineteenth century have regarded the century as a whole. This broad volume examines the cultural and social aspects of travel writing on Africa, Asia, America, the Balkans and Australasia.

Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain’s imperial wars, while others show the complexity of Victorian dreams of the exotic. Still others offer a disapproving glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous peoples in contrast to the imperialist vision of British explorers. Swiss hotel registers, guest books, and guidebooks offer insights into the history of tourism, while new photographic technologies, the development of the telegraph system, and train travel transformed the visual, audial, and even the conjugal experience of travel. The contributors attend to issues of gender and ethnicity in essays on women travelers, South African travel narratives, and accounts of China during the Opium Wars, and analyze the influence of fictional travel narratives. Taken together, these essays show how these multiple narratives circulated, cross-fertilised, and reacted to one another to produce new narratives, new objects, and new modes of travel.

Oceania, or the South Pacific, loomed large in the Victorian popular imagination. It was a world that interested the Victorians for many reasons, all of which suggested to them that everything was possible there. This collection of essays focuses on Oceania’s impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children. Each of these had significant impact. The literature discussed affected mainly the middle and upper classes, while exhibitions and photography reached down into the working classes, as did missionary presentations. The experience of children was central to the Pacific’s effects, as youthful encounters at exhibitions, chapel, home, or school formed lifelong impressions and experience. It would be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselves without considering their engagement with Oceania. While the contributions of India and Africa to the nineteenth-century imagination have been well-documented, examinations of the contributions of Oceania have remained on the periphery of Victorian studies. Oceania and the Victorian Imagination contributes significantly to our discussion of the non-peripheral place of Oceania in Victorian culture.

This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Well-known authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to 'write back' to the legacy of colonialism by using images of illness from climate.

British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising cultural obsession with suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia. "There was," writes John Kucich, "seemingly a different crucifixion scene marking the historical gateway to each colonial theater." In Imperial Masochism, Kucich reveals the central role masochistic forms of voluntary suffering played in late-nineteenth-century British thinking about imperial politics and class identity. Placing the colonial writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad in their cultural context, Kucich shows how the ideological and psychological dynamics of empire, particularly its reorganization of class identities at the colonial periphery, depended on figurations of masochism. Drawing on recent psychoanalytic theory to define masochism in terms of narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence rather than sexual perversion, the book illuminates how masochism mediates political thought of many different kinds, not simply those that represent the social order as an opposition of mastery and submission, or an eroticized drama of power differentials. Masochism was a powerful psychosocial language that enabled colonial writers to articulate judgments about imperialism and class. The first full-length study of masochism in British colonial fiction, Imperial Masochism puts forth new readings of this literature and shows the continued relevance of psychoanalysis to historicist studies of literature and culture.

This book re-examines cultural, social, geographical and philosophical representations of Victorian London by looking at the transformations in urban life produced by the rise and development of urban mass-transport. It also radically re-addresses the questions of epistemology and gender in the Victorian metropolis by mapping the epistemology of the passenger. Vadillo focuses on the lyric urban writings of Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, 'Graham R. Tomson' (Rosamund Marriott Watson) and 'Michael Field' (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Prize

This collection demonstrates how late-Victorian and Edwardian neurology and fiction shared common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies. Between 1860 and 1920 witnessed unprecedented interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists, finding common ground in the prevailing intellectual climate of biological determinism.