School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Voyaging in the Pacific
    Coleman, D ; Morrison, R (Oxford University Press, 2024)
    This chapter examines three major works published over a span of almost five decades: John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the voyages . . . for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), and Dr John Martin’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean (1817). The ‘authors’ named here were not authors but editors, professional literary men who edited, rearranged, compiled, and often embellished the journals, logbooks, and charts of the original travellers. My aim is to see how each of these editors produced the experience of travel textually for Romantic metropolitan audiences. Hawkesworth, the best known, edited the first of James Cook’s three voyages, drawing principally on the journals of Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks. Keate, a friend of Voltaire, shaped the thirteen- week encounter between a shipwrecked British crew and the people of Palau, and Martin took charge of William Mariner’s tale of his four years on Tonga.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    'Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits': The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth Century
    COLEMAN, D ; Lamont, C ; Rossington, M (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
    The eye-catching conjunction of ‘Aetherial journies, submarine exploits’ occurs in William Cowper’s ‘The Winter Evening’, where the poet describes the arrival in his secluded village of newspapers from the great Babel of London — that ‘wilderness of strange / But gay confusion’. Amidst advertisements for ‘Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald’, Cowper lists, Aetherial journies, submarine exploits, And Katterfelto with his hair on end At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Henry Smeathman and the Natural Economy of Slavery
    COLEMAN, D ; Carey, B ; Kitson, P (Boydell & Brewer, 2007)
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Women Writers and Abolition
    Coleman, D ; Labbe, JM (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010-01-01)
    The years 1787–88 mark the high tide of popular abolitionism. What had begun as a small-scale protest, with Quakers submitting their first public petition to Parliament in 1783, was soon to culminate in a sudden and widespread outburst of humanitarian revulsion against the ‘abominable’ and ‘indefensible’ trade. There have been many attempts to explain the speed and breadth of the national mobilization against the slave trade. In a recent contribution Seymour Drescher dismisses arguments that attribute the new popularity to ‘chastened anxiety or national humiliation’ at the loss of the North American colonies. Nor does Drescher see abolitionism’s coming of age as a response to heightened internal class conflict, or to an economic decline in the value of the British slave trade. Without offering much explanation himself, apart from the great expansion of print media in this period, what Drescher does note is that popular abolitionism emerged at one of the most shining moments in British history, when the nation revelled in its ‘prosperity, security and power’.1 This means that, while abolitionists might express strong sentiments of outrage, the underlying premise of their protest involved a degree of complacency. As Drescher puts it, ‘how could the world’s most secure, free, religious, just, prosperous and moral nation allow itself to remain the premier perpetrator of the world’s most deadly, brutal, unjust and immoral offences to humanity? How could its people, once fully informed of its inhumanity, hope to continue to be blessed with peace, prosperity and power?
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Imagining Sameness and Difference: Domestic and Colonial Sisters in Mansfield Park
    COLEMAN, D ; Johnson, C ; Tuite, C (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009)
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Mary Birkett
    COLEMAN, D ; Behrendt, S (Alexander Street Press, 2007)