THE SYLLABUS HAS NOW BEEN REVISED FOR 2020/21.

Module Convenor: Dr Ross G. Forman
r.g.forman@warwick.ac.uk

Seminars: Mondays, 10-11:30; 12-1:30; 5-6:30

Office Hours (H.539): Wednesdays, 11-12 and Thursdays, 12-1. Sign up for Office Hours here.

Overview

This module explores how Britons ‘in empire’ and at home and their ‘subjects’ imagined East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific during the Victorian period. Although concentrating on fiction, it surveys a range of representations, including travel writing, theatre, and essays to expose the various contexts and concerns that shaped Britain’s understanding of these geographical regions and, to some extent, how people in Asia reacted to Britain and the British. The module trains students in historical and cultural approaches to reading literary texts. Topics covered include inter-imperial rivalries; the representation of tea and other commodities; the rise of ethnographic expositions featuring Asian and Pacific food and handicrafts; and late-nineteenth-century interest in East Asian aesthetics. The module also introduces you to popular fiction from the nineteenth century.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module, you should be able to:

• Understand the trajectory of imperialism in Asia and the South Pacific and its influence on Anglophone literatures and cultures during the long nineteenth century.
• Build knowledge about the growth of literacy in English and about Indian writing in English during the period.
• Place British imperialism in Asia and the South Pacific in a comparative context and grasp the concepts of ‘informal imperialism,’ ‘gunboat diplomacy,’ and miscegenation.
• Develop appropriate critical skills with which to analyze popular literary forms, such as the adventure novel and travel narrative.
• Apply a knowledge of critical methodologies such as gender studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies to the set texts.
• Improve your ability to develop a topic of your own choosing and to undertake independent research involving primary and secondary sources.

Outline Syllabus for 2020/21

• Tanya Agathocleous, "Criticism on Trial: Colonizing Affect in Late Victorian-Empire," Victorian Studies 60.3 (2018): 434-460.
• Carolyn Betensky, "Casual Racism in Victorian Literature," Victorian Literature and Culture 47.4 (2019): 723-751.
• Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy R. Wong, "Undisciplining Victorian Studies," LA Review of Books 10 July 2020. Available at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/undisciplining-victorian-studies/
• Ryan D. Fong, "Empire," Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/4 (2018): 665-668.
• Kristin Mahoney, "On the Ceylon National Review, 1906-1911" at the BRANCH CollectiveLink opens in a new window.
• Sukanya Banerjee, "Transimperial," Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3/4 (2018): 925-928.
  
  

• Toru Dutt, "Our Casuarina Tree" in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan [Available from the Library via the Empire Online database or from the ebook of Mary Ellis Gibson's anthology Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India.]
• Rudyard Kipling, "The Phantom Rickshaw"Link opens in a new window

• Elleke Boehmer, "Imperialism and Textuality," Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 13-57.
• Philippa Levine, "Britain in India," The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset" 53-82.
  
  

• Philip Meadows Taylor, Confessions of a Thug.

• Padma Rangarjan, "Thug Life: Confession, Subjectivity, Sovereignty," ELH 84.4 (2017): 1005-1028.
• Mary Poovey, "Ambiguity and Historicism: Interpreting Confessions of a Thug," Narrative 12.1 (2004): 3-21

• Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (to the end).

• Parama Roy, "Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee," in Indian Traffic (UC Press E-books)

• Matthew Kaiser, "Facing a Mirror: Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and the Politics of Imperial Self-Incrimination" in Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame 70-88.

• Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners.
  Download the scanned version of the original owned by Dr Forman here. Link opens in a new window
• Dion Boucicault, Jessie Brown, or the Relief of Lucknow. Available for download at https://archive.org/details/jessiebrownorrel00bouc

• Maria K. Bachman, "Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Perils of Imagined Others" in Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia 101-123.
• Neil Hultgren, "Jessie Brown as Imperial Propaganda," Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes 19-23 (print edition); 22-25 (online edition).

• Lillian Nayder, "Class Consciousness and the Indian Mutiny: The Collaborative Fiction of 1857" in Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship.
• Grace Moore, "A Tale of Three Revolutions: Dickens's Response to the Sepoy Rebellion." Dickens and Empire 113-133.
• Alex Tickell, "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the Limits of Colonial Government." Nineteenth-century Literature 67.4 (2013): 457-489.

• Tennyson, "The Defence of Lucknow" Link opens in a new window
• Karl Marx, "On Imperialism in India," from The Marx Engels Reader: Link opens in a new window
  "The British Rule in India"Link opens in a new window
  "The Future Results of the British Rule in India"Link opens in a new window
• G. A. Henty, "A Pipe of Mystery" Link opens in a new window [Original periodical version published in Union Jack vol. 2, issue 52, 23 Dec. 1880 available via the Library's Gale Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals database.]
• Herbert Hayens, "The Indian Mutiny" in For the Colours: A Boy's Book of the Army Link opens in a new window
• Thomas Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education"Link opens in a new window
  
  
  

• Priti Joshi, "1857; or, Can the Indian 'Mutiny' Be Fixed?" Available from the BRANCH Collective at https://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=priti-joshi-1857-or-can-the-indian-mutiny-be-fixed
• Primamvada Gopal, "The Spirit of the Sepoy Host: The 1857 Uprising in India and Early British Critics of Empire," Chapter 1 of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British DissentLink opens in a new window.
  • Notes Link opens in a new window
    

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• Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rajmohan's Wife (1864). Available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Rajmohan%27s_Wife

• Sukanya Banerjee, "Troubling Conjugal Loyalties: The First Indian Novel in English and the Transimperial Framework of Sensation," Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014): 475-489.
• Supriya Chaudhuri, "Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India" in A History of the Indian Novel in English 31-44.

• Cornelia Sorabji, selected short stories:
  "Love and Death"Link opens in a new window
  "Behind the Purah"
  "SamyuktahLink opens in a new window"
  "Draupadi and the Great Game"Link opens in a new window
• E.F. Chapman, "Cornelia Sorabji," Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian WomenLink opens in a new window (1891) 113-139.
• Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper [Available online via the Library.]

  [Please read:

  I. Duties of the Mistress
  VI. Duties of the Servants
  XIX. Hints on Outfits
  XXX. Advice to the Cook
  XXXII. Game
  XLII. Native Dishes]
  
  
  

  Required Critical Reading:

• Priya Joshi, "The Circulation of Fiction in Indian Libraries, ca. 1835-1901," In Another Country 35-92.

   

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  Week 9: Writing and Resistance
  

• Sri Aurobindo, "The Object of Passive Resistance" in Boehmer, Empire Writing.
• Dadabhai Naoroji, "The Condiiton of India" in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India 636-642.Link opens in a new window
• Sarojini Naidu, "Indian Dancers" and "The Royal Tombs of Golconda."
  [Available from the Library in the ebook of Mary Ellis Gibson's anthology Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India.]
• Hossein, "The Sultana's Dream" Available at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html and at http://www.public-library.uk/
• Dutt, "The Republic of Orissa" in BengalianaLink opens in a new window 347-356.
• TN Mukharji, from A Visit to Europe: preface and Chapter II ("First Impressions"):
  Available for download from the Empire Online database via the Library website.
• Pandita Ramabai, "The Cry of Indian Women" Link opens in a new window in Pandita Ramabai in Her Own Words.
  
  

Required Critical Reading

• Isabel Hofmeyr, "Printing Cultures in the Indian Ocean," Gandhi's Printing Press 30-45 and notes.

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• Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden.
  
  

Required Critical Reading:

• Elizabeth Chang, "Strange Country Gardens," Chapter 3 of Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Nineteenth Century 84- and notes.
  
  
  

Recommended Critical Reading:

• Jessica Straley, "Home Grown: Frances Hodgson Burnett and the Cultivation of Female Evolution," Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature 147-174 and notes.

Term 2: British Engagements with East and Southeast Asia

Criticism:

• Alexander Bubb, "Asian Classic Literature and the English General Reader, 1845-1915" in The Edinburgh History of Reading: Common Readers.
• Elizabeth Chang, China in The Encyclopedia of Victorian LiteratureLink opens in a new window Eds. Felluga, Dino Franco, Pamela K. Gilbert and Linda K. Hughes. Vol. I, 250-52.
• Anna Maria Jones, "Transnational Neo-Victorian Studies: Notes on the Possibilities and Limitations of a Discipline" in Literature Compass 15.7 (2018).
• Julia Kuehn, "Knowing Bodies, Knowing Self: The Western Woman Traveller's Encounter with Chinese Women, Bound Feet and the Half-Caste Child, 1880-1920." Studies in Travel Writing 12.3 (2008): 265-290.
• Josephine McDonagh and Briony Wickes, "The Nineteenth-century Opium Complex: From Thomas Love Peacock to Sherlock Holmes," Literature & History 29.1 (May 2020): 3-18.
• Di Wu, "Wilde in Sinophone Culture," Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer (LGBTQ) History 1727-1731.
  
  

Accompanying Literary Texts:

Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Man with the Twisted Lip"
Yana Toboso, Black Butler vol. 4 (optional)

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• Ross G. Forman, "Peking Plots." China and the Victorian Imagination 98-129.

• Gene Luen Yang, Boxers.

• Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java, Vol.1, Chapter 2. [Available online via the Library website.]
• Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, Chapter 2: "Singapore" and Chapter 40: "The Races of Man in the Malay Archipelago."
  [Available online via the Library website.]
• Bram Stoker, "The Red Stockade." Download at www.bramstoker.org. Link opens in a new window
• G.A. Henty, "In the Hands of the Malays" in In the Hands of the Malays and Other Stories at archive.org.Link opens in a new window
• Anna Leonowenes, from The English Governess at the Siamese Court. Please read: Chapter 1: "On the Threshold" and Chapter 15: "The City of Bangkok."
  Available at archive.org.Link opens in a new window
  
  Recommended Critical Reading:
• Sud Chonchirdsin, "The Ambivalent Attitudes of the Siamese Elite towards the West during the Reign of King Chungalongkorn, 1868-1910," South East Asia Research 17.3 (2009): 433-456.

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• Richard Marsh, The Joss [Available online through archive.orgLink opens in a new window].
• Gertrude Donaldson. "A Vanished Idol." The English Illustrated Magazine Feb. 1909.

•   Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither.
  
  

Required Critical Reading:

• Eddie Tay, "Discourses of Difference: Isabella Bird, Emily Innes and Florence Caddy," Colony, Nation, and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature 31-43.

Methods of Assessment

 

Non-finalists:

TWO 4,000-word essays plus ONE unassessed presentation.

Presentation:

Presentations are meant to be informal and to offer a forum for you to introduce and analyze either a primary text or a critical reading for the week assigned. You are encouraged to develop 1-2 discussion questions to share with the group, either in advance, or during the seminar. Reading beyond the materials on the syllabus is not expected. You may use PowerPoint, if you wish. If you wish to prerecord your presentation because of internet connections or other issues, please consult your tutor.

Essays:

Essay titles will be provided, but you are encouraged to develop your own title, in consultation with your tutor. You are encouraged to attend office hours to discuss your topic and thesis statement or to contact me by email.

Finalists:

TWO 4,500-word essays plus ONE unassessed presentation.

Presentation:

Presentations are meant to be informal and to offer a forum for you to introduce and analyze either a primary text or a critical reading for the week assigned. You are encouraged to develop 1-2 discussion questions to share with the group, either in advance, or during the seminar. Reading beyond the materials on the syllabus is not expected. You may use PowerPoint, if you wish. If you wish to prerecord your presentation because of internet connections or other issues, please consult your tutor.

Essays:

Finalists are expected to develop their own title, in consultation with their tutor. You are encouraged to attend office hours to discuss your topic and thesis statement or to contact me by email.

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Indicative Bibliography

Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Migrant Metaphors. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, http://www.branchcollective.org/. [A huge collective project with articles on over 100 topics written by top scholars from around the world.]

Bubb, Alexander. Meeting without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.

Buettner, Elizabeth. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Chang, Elizabeth. Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century Britain. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

---. Novel Cultivations.. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virgina P, 2019.

The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. Ed Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Edmond, Rod. Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gaugin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Finkelstein, David, and Douglas Peers, eds. Negotiating India in Nineteenth-century Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Forman, Ross G. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.

Francis, Andrew. Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Gan, Wendy. Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890-1945. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2018.

Gibson, Mary Ellis. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913: A Critical Anthology. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2011.

---. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2011.

Gibson, Mary Ellis, ed. Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835-1905: Five Stories of Speculation, Resistance, and Rebellion. London: Anthem Press, 2019.

GoGwilt, Christopher. The Fiction of Geopolitics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Hultgren, Neil. Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.

Jolly, Rosyln. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author's Profession. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Keevak, Michael. Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011.

Lee, Klaudia Hiu Yen. Charles DIckens and China, 1895-1915: Cross-Cultural Encounters. London: Routledge, 2016.

Moore, Grace, ed. Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011.

Mukherjee, Pablo. Crime and Empire: Representing India in the Nineteenth-Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Patke, Rajeev S., and Philip Holden. The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English. London: Routledge, 2010.

Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.

Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculnity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the "Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.

Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of British India. 1992. London: Penguin, 2005.

Thurin, Susan. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842-1907. Athens: Ohio UP, 1999.

Tickell, Alex. Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 8th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.