A new book by Dr Barbara Franchi and Dr Elvan Mutlu looks at how the Victorians viewed and divided space.
How did Victorian travelers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.
Dr Barbara Franchi is an Assistant Lecturer at the School of English. Dr Elvan Mutlu is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University and is an alumna of the University of Kent.