Coda

2021 ◽  
pp. 186-202
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
British People ◽  
Yosano Akiko

This concluding chapter reverses the perspective of the preceding chapters and explores travel writings of Meiji Japanese women who sailed to Victorian Britain. It focuses on the writings of three Japanese women—namely, Tsuda Umeko, Yasui Tetsu, and Yosano Akiko—with diverse backgrounds and purposes. It picks up testimonies of travelling women in Meiji Japan who encountered British people and culture and unveils cross-racial female intimacy and burgeoning transnational feminist alliance on the issues of women’s education and civil rights. It documents their connections with Victorian female educationists such as Dorothea Beale and Elizabeth Phillips Hughes and discovers a long-forgotten link between Isabella Bird and Meiji women’s education.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-52
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Women's Travel ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
East West

The introductory chapter provides the historical and cultural contexts to situate the discussions on Victorian women’s travel writing on Meiji Japan in the wider academic debate on the British Empire, Victorian literature, and female travel writing. It provides an overview of Anglo–Japanese relations between 1854 and 1912 to trace shifts in the bilateral relationship and foreground its singularity in a multitude of East–West encounters. It then examines travel writings by both male and female travellers to Meiji Japan and fictional representations of the country in Victorian literature and theatre. It surveys travelogues by a group of female travellers alongside those by diplomats and journalists like Kipling, Japan-related writings by Wilde and Stevenson, and theatrical pieces such as The Mikado. The chapter considers the literary invention of Japan and analyses how women travellers negotiated discursive constraints due to gender and colonialism and challenged mainstream representations of Japan and Japanese people.

Autoexotic Literary Encounters between Meiji Japan and the West: Sōseki Natsume's “The Tower of London” (1905) and Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan (1904)

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Edo Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
Travel Writings

As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” () culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.

Walter Scott’s Long-Distance Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-69
Author(s):  
Josephine McDonagh
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Constituent Element ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Displaced People ◽  
Novelistic Form ◽  
British Culture ◽  
British People

Innovations in novelistic form that appear at the end of the Napoleonic Wars do so in the context of a national discussion about colonial emigration, and an uprooting and dispersing of British people on a profound scale, that provoked a reimagining of global space. Poverty, unemployment, and security, both domestically and in the colonies, were concerns about which emigration was proposed as a possible solution. This helps to explain two influential formal innovations made by Walter Scott in Guy Mannering (1815). The first is the invention of a new geographical imaginary. The novel is distinctive for its international backstory that takes place in India outside the main temporal and geographical frames of the novel, as well as a mode of calibrating distance in relation to details of size and scale, and through manipulating levels of readerly attention. The second innovation is its eccentric character, the gypsy, Meg Merrilies, who specifically derives from these spatial concerns. Her character is especially topical as it draws on contemporary beliefs about gypsies, a displaced people thought to have originated in India, but who are also identified with Scottish peasants displaced during the Highland Clearances, and other indigenous displaced people. Through the character of Meg, the novel examines contemporary questions about property, place, and belonging, as well as race and indigeneity. Meg’s persistence in print culture through the next several decades, reimagined in theatrical renditions, poems, print commodities, and travel writings, turns her into a celebrity character, and constituent element of a migratory British culture.

Industrial Emigration in Early Victorian Britain

1953 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilbur S. Shepperson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
British People

Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, emigration has been a habit with the British people. But it was the nineteenth century, when almost seventeen million persons emigrated, that witnessed the United Kingdom's most extensive exodus: approximately eighty per cent of the emigrants went to North America. A broad, historical explanation of the forces that motivated British subjects to abandon their homeland can be found in numerous works. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to view in greater detail one small facet of a not uncommon, yet entangling, subject. A series of specialized studies producing greater exactness of information would perhaps lead to a fuller and more complete understanding of a topic that has been open to much conjecture.

scholarly journals Grants and Acquisitions

2017 ◽  
Vol 78 (8) ◽  
pp. 467
Author(s):  
Ann-Christe Galloway
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
Code Blue ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Film Preservation ◽  
Production Company ◽  
Eyes On The Prize

The Washington University Libraries Film and Media Archive has received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve Code Blue, a 1972 recruitment film aimed at bringing minorities into the medical profession. Code Blue is one of the earliest existing films created by Henry Hampton’s Boston-based documentary company Blackside Inc., which produced the Emmy Award-winning civil rights series Eyes on the Prize. Blackside became the largest African American-owned film production company of its time and was home to many filmmakers from diverse backgrounds, including African Americans, immigrants, and women. The 27-minute documentary includes footage from an emergency room in Harlem, a tour through areas of Nashville with a doctor who did outreach to poor families, and discussions with young men and women from different backgrounds who could explain the value of medical education. Code Blue helped to bring new talent into the medical field and was used in hundreds of high schools and medical training curricula nationwide for more than 20 years. The film won a CINE Golden Eagle Award and was seen around the world, including at film festivals as far away as Venice’s Festival dei Popoli.

A Scientist in Love

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-185
Author(s):  
Tomoe Kumojima
Keyword(s):  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
Love Letters ◽  
Controversial Aspect

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911), and Plays of Old Japan: The ‘Nō’ (1913)—along with her unpublished transcripts and correspondence. It unveils an unconventional, stormy romance, a warm friendship, and literary collaboration. It considers the gender and racial complexities Stopes textually negotiated for the sake of her love and friendship against the rigid imperial ideology and the Victorian notion of femininity, which produced a distinct representation of humanized Japan as Britain’s masculine ally with feminine sensibility. It also discusses particular challenges Western women in a cross-racial relationship faced in Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. The close examination of this underexplored phase of Stopes’s career reveals the incipience of her sexology and complicates the posthumous, more controversial aspect of her as eugenicist.

Defending the Faith through Education: The Catholic Case for Parental and Civil Rights in Victorian Britain

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric G. Tenbus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Property Taxes ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
New Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
State Education ◽  
Education Act ◽  
The Government ◽  
First Time

The struggle to provide primary education for the Catholic poor in England and Wales dominated the agenda of English Catholic leaders in the last half of the nineteenth century. This effort occurred within the larger framework of a national educational revolution that slowly pushed the government into providing public education for the first time. Although state education grants at the elementary level began in 1833, lingering problems forced the government to establish a new era of educational provision with the controversial Education Act of 1870. This act created a dual education system consisting of the long-standing denominational schools operated by the different churches and new rate-supported board schools, operated by local school boards, providing no religious instruction or nondenominational religious instruction. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the dual system grew intolerable for Catholics because local rates (property taxes) only supported the board schools and gave them almost unlimited funding while Catholic schools struggled to make ends meet on school pence and shrinking state grants, which Catholics had only had access to beginning in 1847.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document