Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship examines forgotten stories of cross-cultural friendship and intimacy between Victorian female travel writers and Meiji Japanese. Drawing on unpublished primary sources and contemporary Japanese literature hithero untranslated into English it highlights the open subjectivity and addective relationality of Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes in their interactions with Japanese hosts. Victorian Women's Travel Writing on Meiji Japan demonstates how travel narratives and literary works about non-colonial Japan complicate and challenge Oriental stereotypes and imperial binaries. It traces the shifts in the representation of Japan in Victorian discourse from obsequious mousmé to virile samurai alongside transitions in the Anglo-Japanese bilateral relationship and global geopolitical events. Considering the ethical and political implications of how Victorian women wrote about their Japanese friends, it examines how female travellers created counter discourses. It charts the unexplored terrain of female interracial and cross-cultural friendship and love in Victorian literature, emphasizing the agency of female travellers against the scholarly tendency to depoliticize their literary praxis. It also offers parallel narratives of three Meiji women in Britain - Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko -and transnational feminist alliance. The book is a celebration of the political possibility of female friendship and literature, and a reminder of the ethical responsibility of representing racial and cultural others.

Innovative and comprehensive coverage of women writers' careers and literary achievements spanning many literary genres during the Victorian period.

This book is a companion volume to Dickens and Italy, edited by Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano, which aimed to fill an important gap in our understanding of England’s paramount novelist by studying his personal, political and literary relation to the foreign country he loved best of all of those he visited. Its focus is wider and its scope more ambitious and speculative. Without in any way leaving Dickens or his writings about Italy behind, the attempt here is to approach the Victorian fascination with that country from a broader, more theoretical perspective in which several current debates about travel writing are taken up and critically redeployed. The book is articulated in three parts. Part One concerns what the writings of Dickens and other Victorians can tell us about the history and theory of travel and travel writing, and Part Two, what they can tell us about particular Victorian writers themselves and their work. In Part Three the focus shifts in order to compare writing and visual representations of the experience of ‘abroad’ in general and Italy in particular, in an era when what can be thought of as modern visual culture is gradually taking shape. The book aims to show that the study of how Victorians imagined Italy can lead to a deeper understanding of some of the stereotypes that continue to inform contemporary tourism.

This study explores the cultural and political impact of Victorian travelers' descriptions of physical and verbal violence in Africa. Travel narratives provide a rich entry into the shifting meanings of colonialism, as formal imperialism replaced informal control in the Nineteenth century. Offering a wide-ranging approach to travel literature's significance in Victorian life, this book features analysis of physical and verbal violence in major exploration narratives as well as lesser-known volumes and newspaper accounts of expeditions. It also presents new perspectives on Olive Schreiner and Joseph Conrad by linking violence in their fictional travelogues with the rhetoric of humanitarian trusteeship.

The nexus between travel, writing and media in the contemporary world is dense: travel practice is increasingly interwoven with media; representations in old and new media are co-present and converge. Digitisation has had a profound impact on the practice and mediation of travel, but this volume aims to show that travel and its representation have always been enlaced with media. With contributions by experts in literary and cultural studies, journalism studies and informatics, the book takes a multi- and interdisciplinary approach and covers a wide range of media, from the hand-crafted album to social media. It illustrates how current transformations invite us to revisit earlier periods of travel writing and their media environments, and to explore the ways in which contemporary forms of mediation are prefigured by earlier practices and forms. The book addresses readers interested in travel writing, travel studies and cultural studies. Chapters Introduction, 3, 7 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Freiburg.