Oceania, or the South Pacific, loomed large in the Victorian popular imagination. It was a world that interested the Victorians for many reasons, all of which suggested to them that everything was possible there. This collection of essays focuses on Oceania's impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children. Each of these had significant impact. The literature discussed affected mainly the middle and upper classes, while exhibitions and photography reached down into the working classes, as did missionary presentations. The experience of children was central to the Pacific's effects, as youthful encounters at exhibitions, chapel, home, or school formed lifelong impressions and experience. It would be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselves without considering their engagement with Oceania. While the contributions of India and Africa to the nineteenth-century imagination have been well-documented, examinations of the contributions of Oceania have remained on the periphery of Victorian studies. Oceania and the Victorian Imagination contributes significantly to our discussion of the non-peripheral place of Oceania in Victorian culture.

Autorentext

Richard D. Fulton is Vice Chancellor at the University of Hawai'i-Windward Community College, USA, and Peter H. Hoffenberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, USA.

Inhalt

Introduction, Richard D. Fulton, Peter H. Hofenberg; Part 1 Travel, Exhibitions and Photography; Chapter 1 Pacific Phantasmagorias: Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Photography, Carla Manfredi; Chapter 2 "Greater Britain": Late Imperial Travel Writing and the Settler Colonies, Anna Johnston; Chapter 3 The South Seas Exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair, 1893, Mandy Treagus; Chapter 4 Displaying an Oceanic Nation and Society: The Kingdom of Hawai?i at Nineteenth-Century International Exhibitions, Peter H. Hoffenberg; Part 2 Fiction and the Pacific; Chapter 5 "The White Lady and the Brown Woman": Colonial Masculinity and Domesticity in Louis Becke's By Reef and Palm (1894), Sumangala Bhattacharya; Chapter 6 Who's Who in "The Isle of Voices"? How Victorian Robert Louis Stevenson Viewed Pacific Islanders' Perceptions of Victorians and of Themselves, Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega; Chapter 7 At Home in the Empire: Domesticity and Masculine Identity in Almayer's Folly and "The Beach of Falesá", Ingrid Ranum; Chapter 8 Isolation and Variation on Doctor Moreau's Oceanic Island, Genie Babb; Part 3 Childhood and Children; Chapter 9 Cooks and Queens and Dreams: The South Sea Islands as Fairy Islands of Fancy, Michelle Patricia Beissel Heath; Chapter 10 The South Seas in Mid-Victorian Children's Imagination, Richard D. Fulton; Chapter 11 Watermarks on The Coral Island: The Pacific Island Missionary as Children's Hero, Michelle Elleray; Chapter 12 "Turned topsy-turvy": William Howitt, Antipodean Colonial Space and Victorian Children's Literature, Judith Johnston;