Abstract This article draws on an alternate history approach to the Victorian world and discusses steampunk and neo-Victorian literary and cultural features. It focuses on Richard Francis Burton-one of the most charismatic and controversial explorers and men of letters of his time-who stands out in a complex web of both real-life and fictional characters and events. Ultimately, the essay presents a twenty-first-century revisitation of the British Empire and the imperial project, thus providing a contemporary perception of Victorian worldliness and outward endeavours.
Performing Identities and Utopias of Belonging consists of sixteen essays, reflecting the current conflicted debate on the ontology, constructiveness and affect of categories of ascribed social identity such as gender, ethnicity, race and nation, in the context of British, Irish and North American cultural landscapes. They address the many ways in which these communities of belonging are imagined, iterated, performed, questioned, and deconstructed in literature, cinema and visual culture; the
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In response to Lytton Strachey's remark that the history of the Victorian Age would never be written because we know too much about it (9), one can argue that the greater our temporal distance to the Victorians is, the more we appear to be interested in them. As Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich have noted about this persistent preoccupation, "the Victorian age [is] historically central to late-century postmodern consciousness" (Kucich and Sadoff xi). The continuous reiterations of the Victorian in popular neo-Victorian cultural artefacts have contributed to the establishment of the area of neo-Victorian studies, with the publication, in recent decades, of several books focused on millennial and post-millennial literary engagements with the Victorians. Also growing out of this awareness that matrixes of modernity and postmodernity can be found in the Victorian period, an increasing interest in the sphere of domesticity has resulted in the uncovering of neglected archives. From novels to government reports, the Victorians attached unprecedented significance to domesticity. The household was a pivotal institution, and their occupants performed their different roles according to custom and circumstance. Within its sphere, gender, class, economic and political conflicts were played out as the household provided the background for significant social practices ranging from the kitchen to the parlour, from the street to the Houses of Parliament, from the colonial metropole to the British colonial outposts in Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific. The discourses of Victorian domesticity have been the subject of quite a few publications over the last decades. These approaches stress the interdisciplinary potential for interpretation of the characteristics of the period and often underline the strands of radical thought which encouraged aspirations for upward social mobility. The inquiry into the performance of domesticity and the management of privacy by, for instance, some of the leading figures of the Victorian period ...
Following the organization, in 2009, of the first conference on The British Empire: Ideology, Perspectives, Perception, the Research Group dedicated to Culture Studies at the University of the Lisbon Centre for English Studies organized, in 2010, a second conference under the general title Empire Building and Modernity. This conference constitutes the second part of a three year project undertaken by the group, which will be followed, in 2011, by a third initiative, called Reviewing Imperial Conflicts. The proceedings of the second conference are now presented in this book. Empire Building and Modernity gives a larger scope to the original project, which was developed more strictly around the British Empire, and provides the opportunity to deal with questions related to the formation of modern European empires, namely the Portuguese Colonial Empire. The different chapters in this book reveal a variety of approaches that are very often at the cutting edge of the methodologies adopted in cultural studies, particularly in the field of post-colonial studies. The building of new perceptions on imperial issues interpreted through literature, the visual arts, history and political science, the role of museums, questions of gender and race and the construction of identity through language constitute the guidelines of the contributions presented in this volume. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed discussing the issues that contributed to its making. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
