Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Introduction: The Irish Soldier in the British Army, c. 1680-1922
Get PDFThe papers in this volume are a selection of those delivered at a conference at the National Army Museum in London in July 2022, held to mark the centenary of the disbandment of the ‘southern’ Irish regiments on the creation of the Irish Free State. This introduction summarizes each paper, situating them in analysis of past historiography on the Irish soldier in the British Army. It argues that while the First World War still looms large in that historiography, researchers are now more often moving beyond it, while also analysing matters such as class, gender and global contexts
Deforestation and Decolonization: Lafcadio Hearn’s French Antillean Writing
Get PDFLooking outside at my breadfruit tree reminds me how European colonialism shaped Caribbean landscape through the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonization of their lands, followed by the theft, commodification and dispersal of indigenous plants and botanic knowledge. Furthermore, these processes were accompanied by the production and hierarchization of race and the enslavement and exploitation of African and Asian populations. As Elizabeth Deloughrey, Renee Gosson, and George Handley note, ‘there is probably no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation and settlement than the Caribbean’. Yet, our ability to detect ecoimperialist activities by reading Caribbean landscapes is hampered by ‘the ever-expanding and ambitious imaginative symbolism’ through which the colonizers constituted the islands as tropical paradises’. As Deloughrey explains, ‘at the height of the process of altering and damaging island landscapes, tropical islands were interpellated in Edenic terms, removed in space and time’ and segregated from human agency. This interpellation, still active in today’s tourism advertisements, naturalizes the altered landscapes, thereby effacing the violent ecological history of the Caribbean plantation economy
After a Decadent Fashion: E. Pauline Johnson and the Staging of Indigeneity
Get PDFAt the peak of her popularity in the 1890s, the Mohawk and Canadian writer Emily Pauline Johnson (or Tekahionwake) was one of the most recognizable literary figures in North America – a reputation earned largely through dramatic recitals of her poetry and prose rather than on the printed page. The daughter of George Henry Martin Johnson, a hereditary chief of the Mohawks of the Six Nations reserve, and Emily Howells, an Englishwoman and relation of American novelist William Dean Howells, she garnered such public acclaim that in 1895 the critic Hector Charlesworth could proclaim without controversy that ‘[f]or the past five years, Miss Pauline Johnson has been the most popular figure in Canadian literature’. This popularity had much to do with Johnson’s performance of her own Indigeneity. A typical recital would begin with Johnson taking the stage in an elaborate buckskin dress; after the intermission, she would return in a Victorian gown. As a woman of mixed Mohawk and English descent with an overwhelmingly white settler audience, Johnson’s access to the literary marketplace was predicated on her ability to navigate a system of stereotypes, myths, and stock images that structured settler conceptions of Indigenous peoples. Thus, on page and stage alike, she felt compelled to enact an autoexoticizing performance of her own Indigeneity – a performance that was self-consciously stereotypical but that also ironized the audiences who consumed and propagated such stereotypes. Critics’ efforts to articulate more fully the agential or recuperative dimensions of these complicated acts of autoexoticism have been among the most fruitful strains in recent Johnson scholarship
Leopold Andrian, The Garden of Knowledge (1895): A New Translation
Get PDFThere was once a prince of some lands bordering on Germany who, when he was twenty years old or so, married a beautiful woman. He was very different from her, but she loved this difference in him, alluring mystery full of promise that it was, one that she believed sooner or later would wonderfully reveal itself. In the second year of their marriage, she bore him a son who resembled her more with every day that went by. Time passed, and, remaining as they did very different from each other, the hope which had nourished her love began to wane. Ten years later the prince fell ill, and as his end drew nigh, when his bracelet became too large for his wrist and his rings too large for his fingers, his face changing with each passing week, she felt again that uneasy love that she had once had for him, without, however, the hope that had formerly accompanied it, knowing as she did that he would shortly die. When the prince did then die, she thought that it was his death alone that had prevented the mystery from being revealed to her. And she mourned for him. Her son, Erwin, though, had her hands and voice, and the very sound of his voice both disturbed and assuaged the fulsomeness of her pain. And so it was that she sent him to boarding school
Review: Brad Evans, Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)
Get PDFAs the subtitle of Brad Evans’s Ephemeral Bibelots provocatively suggests, this is a book about some long-obscured origins of American Modernism, about the relationship between the American and the international, and about the faddishness of fin-de-siècle ephemeral bibelots that largely have been ignored in studies of the period. As such, this book deepens our understanding of modern periodical studies and of long Modernism as it recovers a transformative print-cultural moment
From ‘Sick Comforts’ to ‘Doctor’s Garden’: British Naval Hospital Ships, 1620 to 1815
Get PDFBritish hospital ships of the seventeenth century were hired vessels providing ‘sick comforts’, and safe conveyance for sick and wounded men. Even after the establishment of Admiralty regulations in the eighteenth century, the medical staffing of hospital ships varied in quantity and quality. Nonetheless, these ships extracted sick and wounded men from warships, cared for them, conveyed them to Naval hospitals, accommodated them when convalescent, and repatriated them when invalided out. Under the Physician to the Fleet, hospital ships became part of the Navy’s efforts to ensure that fresh provisions – the ‘doctor’s garden’ – and medical necessities kept seamen fighting fit
‘A fanatical separation money mob’: The British Army Soldier’s Wife in Wartime Ireland, 1914-1918
Get PDFThis article focuses on the experiences of Irish soldiers’ families during the Great War. Soldiers’ families occupied a complex place in Irish society. Initially supported and praised for their husband’s service, working-class women quickly came under criticism and surveillance from the British state and civic authorities. They developed a reputation for excessive drinking and neglect of their children, blamed on the corrupting influence of the separation allowance. The 1916 Easter Rising and the by-elections in 1917 and 1918 provided opportunities for violent clashes and for the negative reputation of the women to be cemented in the public imagination. Separation women as an identifiable group disappeared in the aftermath of the war but the difficulties and challenges for Irish military families continued
Fibres, Folds, and Trimmings: The Decadent Materials of Sarah Grand’s Emotional Moments
Get PDFThe emergence of the late Victorian ‘New Woman’ – a term popularized in a series of articles by Sarah Grand and Ouida, published in the North American Review in 1894 – has often been linked to fin-de-siècle sartorial discourses such as the rational dress movement and Aesthetic dress. ‘Rational’ ensembles inspired by menswear ‘allowed women physical and social mobility’ and were therefore an important means of expressing dissent towards Victorian gender ideologies.[i] By contrast, the connotations of Aesthetic or artistic dress, associated with ‘looseness and lack of structure, natural waist’ and ‘disavowal of the corset’, were less explicitly political.[ii] As Kimberly Wahl writes, Aesthetic dress ‘was rarely viewed as a direct challenge to hegemonic norms of gender in Victorian fashion culture’, but it was based on artistic conceptions of naturalness instead.[iii] Yet Aesthetic dress, too, appealed to New Women, in both fiction and fact.
[i] Madeleine C. Seys, ‘Rational Dress’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. by Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris (Cham: Palgrave, 2022), pp. 1317-20 (p. 1318).
[ii] Kimberly Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2013), p. xi.
[iii] Kimberly Wahl, ‘Bifurcated Garments and Divided Skirts: Redrawing the Boundaries of the Sartorial Feminine in Late Victorian Culture’, in Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend, ed. by Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry (Bristol: Intellect, 2020), pp. 22-34 (p. 22)
(Un)Dressing Decadence: Masquerade and Murder in Mascara
Get PDFIt opens on a blue vista of sea. A white villa looks out over the waves and glows in the evening light. A woman comes out, encased in a tight-fitting white trouser suit. She climbs into a car and drives off. The sea remains, its waves stretching out to the horizon as in a painting by René Magritte. Night falls. We see the woman driving in close-up, her face lit pale yellow by passing cars. We may recognize her as Charlotte Rampling, the cinema’s perverse glamour icon par excellence. Yet her image here is altered, her hair cropped short so she resembles an androgynous boy. Her throat rises from the up-curving collar of her white suit, which encases her like the sculpted calyx of a lily. One earring dangles from one ear. Its white geometrical swirls suggest a sculpture by Constantin Brâncuşi