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Comyn, Sarah
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Comyn, Sarah
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Comyn, Sarah
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- PublicationEarly Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern HemisphereThis introduction outlines the primary arguments and methodologies of the book, including new imperial history models, networked conceptualisations of empire, and comparative and transnational history. It argues both for the existence of transnational institutional connections and reading audiences across the colonial southern hemisphere, and for the importance of local and regional variations in the reproduction of the British public library model. It concludes by outlining the book’s primary sources, as well as introducing its six case study libraries from colonial Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.
636 - PublicationRethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methodsDrawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.
Scopus© Citations 3 210 - PublicationIntroduction: southern worlds, globes, and spheresThis collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by prioritising southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. Worlding the south examines the dialectics of literary worldedness in ways that recognise inequalities of power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. The collection revises current literary histories of the 'British world' by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, and south-south perspectives.
313 - PublicationLiterary Sociability on the Goldfields: The Mechanics’ Institute in the Colony of Victoria, 1854-1870Examining the connections between the social and economic aspects of mechanics’ institutes in their gold-rush settings of colonial Victoria, Australia, this article situates literary sociability at the heart of the institute’s function. Through an analysis of colonial newspaper reports and the surviving archives of five gold-rush era institutes (Ballaarat, Beechworth, Chiltern, Sandhurst and Stanley), it demonstrates how events like popular readings, lecture series and soirées worked to create a cohesive community in a diverse society. While the gold rush provided the economic means by which these institutions could be formed and their buildings erected, the institutes in turn lent a social and economic propriety to these growing settlements. This article argues that these popular, social events were crucial not only to the cultural and economic functions the mechanics’ institutes began to serve in the goldfields but also the role of moral, social and educational improvement that these institutes and their founding members envisioned themselves as playing. Excavating the hitherto ignored roles of women in these early settlements, this article examines women’s significance as markers of colonial respectability, while revealing the vital financial contribution they made to these institutes through the social events they organized.
390Scopus© Citations 2