Porscha Fermanis

Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 posits that the nineteenth-century settler novel, far from being a generic and belated version of metropolitan fiction, can assist us in understanding complex, transitionary modes of settler and migrant cultural identification across and between multiple settler colonial spaces. It therefore seeks to disrupt linear understandings of Angloworld migration as a single ship voyage from Europe or America in favour of a broader heuristic grounded in the thickness of networks and interrelations, and in relations of entanglement, connection, proximity, and contiguity. The book's focus is on two themes: first, the ways in which settler fiction encodes regional spatial imaginaries, such as Australasia, Oceania, and the trans-Tasman world; and second, representations of imagined noncommunities, marginalised or precarious political subjects, and the historically punishable bodies of Indigenous and mixed-race peoples, indentured labourers, non-European diasporas, convicts, white paupers, and those considered eugenically unfit. Moving away from curiously static understandings of settler cultural history as the reproduction of modular British institutions, this book demonstrates that settler fiction requires us to read settlerism against its professed ideology of stability, permanence, and coherence.

Working against the long-standing belief that romantic-era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotion, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks both the paradigms of resurrection and revivification that have come to stand for romantic history and that history's place within the development of modern history.

Working against the long-standing belief that romantic-era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotions, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks the paradigm of resurrection or revivification that has come to stand for romantic history, as well as that history's place within the development of modern historiography.

This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and 'new imperial history' paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan 'intercultures', it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book's six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed 'Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere' digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and 'new imperial history' paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan 'intercultures', it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book's six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed 'Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere' digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and ‘new imperial history’ paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan ‘intercultures’, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today. Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this book considers:Important propositions and landmark ideas in the Romantic period;Key debates and critical approaches to Romantic studies;New and revisionary approaches to Romantic literature and art;The ways in which Romantic writing interacts with broader trends in history, politics, and aesthetics;European and Global Romanticism;The legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Containing useful, reader-friendly features such as explanatory case studies, chapter summaries, and suggestions for further reading, this clear and engaging book is an invaluable resource for anyone who intends to study and research the complexity and diversity of the Romantic period, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today. Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this book considers:Important propositions and landmark ideas in the Romantic period;Key debates and critical approaches to Romantic studies;New and revisionary approaches to Romantic literature and art;The ways in which Romantic writing interacts with broader trends in history, politics, and aesthetics;European and Global Romanticism;The legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Containing useful, reader-friendly features such as explanatory case studies, chapter summaries, and suggestions for further reading, this clear and engaging book is an invaluable resource for anyone who intends to study and research the complexity and diversity of the Romantic period, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. Key Features: *The first book-length consideration of the relationship between Keats and the ideas of the Enlightenment *New and distinctive argument about Keats reassessing his intellectual life and contexts *Contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the Romantic period and the eighteenth century/Enlightenment, currently one of the most important debates in literary scholarship *Wide appeal to scholars, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates of eighteenth-century and Romantic period literature, history and philosophy; cultural and intellectual historians; historians of ideas