In 1829, while still incarcerated in Newgate Goal for abducting an underage heiress, the political economist and social reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield anonymously published his speculative Letter from Sydney, The Principal Town of Australasia, a compilation of eleven anonymous letters previously published in the Morning Chronicle. Wakefield was, of course, nowhere…
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Networks, Nodes, and Beacons: Cultural Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia’, in Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production, ed. Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 255-74. Taking as its case study a cluster of schools, libraries, and…
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia’, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historique (2021): https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/historical-reflections/47/2/hrrh470208.xml Abstract: Viewing Brexit as part of a longer history of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural exceptionalism, this article reflects on what Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) can tell us about the utopian impulses informing Brexit’s neoimperialist ideology and hence about…
Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis will be talking about hemispheric studies, southern theory, and Romantic/Victorian literature with Robert Aguirre for the Global Nineteenth-Century Society this Thursday 2 June (8pm UK time). They will also be discussing some of the wonderful work done by the contributors to the edited…
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Queering the Imperial Romance: Settler Colonialism, Heteronormativity, and Interracial Intimacy in Sygurd Wiśniowski’s Tikera’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 17.3 (2021): http://ncgsjournal.com/issue173/PDFs/fermanis.pdf Abstract: Building on the idea of queer studies as a ‘subjectless’ critique that has no fixed political referent, this article considers the politics of interracial romance…