1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910815335503321

Titolo

Victorian traffic : identity, exchange, performance / / edited by Sue Thomas

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Newcastle, : Cambridge Scholars, 2008

Newcastle : , : Cambridge Scholars, , 2008

ISBN

1-4438-1025-8

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (349 p.)

Altri autori (Persone)

ThomasSue <1955->

Disciplina

306.3094109034

Soggetti

Communication and traffic - Great Britain - History - 19th century

Libros electrónicos.

Great Britain History Victoria, 1837-1901

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

TABLE OF CONTENTS; LIST OF IMAGES; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; INTRODUCTION; PART I; GIFTS OF PATCHWORK AND VISITS TO WHITEHALL; "I CANNOT SEE ONE WITHOUT THINKING OF THE OTHER"; AUTHORISING THE SELF; EXOTICISM IN ANGLO-INDIAN WOMEN'S FICTION, 1880-1920; "FLASHED FROM WIRE TO WIRE, THROUGH THE CONTINENTS OF THE OLD AND NEW WORLD"; THE TRAFFIC IN GOSSIP; ANGLO-AUSTRALIANS ON FLEET STREET, 1892-1905; FRIEDA CASSIN'S WITH SILENT TREAD AND THE SPECTRE OF LEPROSY IN ANTIGUA AND BRITAIN, 1889-91; PART II; AGENTS OR OBJECTS?; PAULINE JOHNSON-TEKAHIONWAKE; OSCAR'S WILD(E) YEAR IN AMERICA

FEMALE PLEASURE AND MUSCULAR ARMS IN TOURING TRAPEZE ACTSPART III; TRAFFIC IN PICTURES; TRANSPORTING GENRES; THE TRAFFIC OF IDENTITY; LITTLE MAN WALKING; "THE GREAT AND WONDERFUL LABYRINTH"; SPECTRAL TRAFFIC; BIBLIOGRAPHY; CONTRIBUTORS; INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

Organised around the themes Home and Abroad, Performative Traffic, and Image, Circulation, Mobility, Victorian Traffic: Identity, Performance, Exchange variously addresses the cultural dimensions of traffic in the long Victorian period: cross-cultural experience; colonial and racial imaginaries; everyday, literary, autobiographical and



professional stagings of identity; and trade in metaphors, communications, texts, images, celebrity, character types, and quilts. The concept of traffic underpins historical interpretation and theoretical formulations, and the rhetorics of trade in Victorian usage are contextualised. Understandings of identity emphasise the performative and the negotiation of agency in relation to social and cultural scriptings of gender, class, ethnicity and community. The essays have a wide global range and reach.'This collection of essays takes as its theme an enormously important concept for the nineteenth century: traffic, a term that, in a time of unprecedented commercial and imperial expansion, technological developments, population growth and urbanization, acquired new resonance, and came to signify the intensely transactional nature of modernity. One of Ruskin's most searing critiques of the spiritual condition of England, an invited lecture he delivered in 1864 on the topic of the Bradford Exchange, is entitled ‘Traffic', and the word clearly signifies for him all that is wrong with post-industrial capitalism. But this stimulating volume encompasses a range of other significations that have additionally come to accrue around the term, relating for example to inter-cultural exchange, to the circulation of ideas and images, to the commodification of identity, and to literature, art and performance in the market place. The scope of the collection is, appropriately, global, including essays on England's relations of exchange with Australia, New Zealand, North America, the Far East, and the Caribbean. What we are shown ineluctably is that the traffic between Victorian Britain and the reaches of empire, between Home and Abroad, was two-way, a vehicle for cross-cultural encounter, mediation and trade; and that cultural identity is relational, circulatory and always in motion.'—Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London.