Adventures in Many Lands: Global Victorian Literatures

Catalog description

The nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of the British empire, creating faster and more intricate networks of transportation and exchange for goods, people, and ideas across the globe. For British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, these networks offered the opportunity for "strange and amusing adventures," allowing a widowed Black woman to become, as she writes in her autobiography, "quite a female Ulysses." Beginning with Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, we will investigate how movements generated by the British imperial project are narrated both by those embedded in its networks and by critics reading those accounts, from Jane Eyre's globalized marriage economies to recent critical calls to "undiscipline" Victorian studies. Traversing literatures, life-writing, and literary criticism from the Caribbean, North America, South Asia, and United Kingdom, we will study the global exchange of social ideas of gender, race, and national identity alongside the material exchange of literature, goods, and labor. By reading diverse primary and critical accounts of immigration, import and export, missionary work, and marriage, we will contribute to the expanding geographic and critical bounds of Victorian studies while analyzing how empire shapes and is shaped by stories told by and about those within it.