By Claudia Capancioni, with Mariaconcetta Costantini and Julia Kuehn
This June we celebrate how, four years ago, the Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) hosted its first International Study Day abroad, thanks to the initiative of Mariaconcetta Costantini, who is now the co-editor of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal. On 10 and 11 June 2022, we joined her at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, in Italy, for ‘Women & the East: Gendered Narratives of Encounter in Victorian Popular Writing’, a two-day conference with eighteen delegates from eleven countries. Some of us attended in person, including the keynote speaker, Julia Kuehn (then the VPFA President; her keynote is still available on the VPFA website), and some were online, because we still grappled with the global health emergency that was COVID-19. The conference was a great opportunity to share ideas, discuss research methods and resources, and plant the seeds for collaborative projects, including Re-examining Nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter, a volume recently published by Manchester University Press in their ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Series’, which collects contributions from many VPFA colleagues. Co-edited by Mariaconcetta, Julia and myself, this is a timely collection that creates exciting dialogues between understudied texts and writers and more established literary and non-fictional stories of travel and narratives of encounter. Its aim is to reassess and contribute novel approaches to formations of gender in relation to sites and lives considered ‘other’ and ‘east’ of the nineteenth-century British world and tackle debates around East/West relations and how the Easts were conceptualised, with real Victorian and contemporary political relevance.
The Study Day was a point of departure for us to focus on the ‘East’, conceived in broader terms than usual, and move the critical lenses further, three decades after the publication of the seminal works of Sara Mills (Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism, 1991), Billie Melman (Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918, 1992) and Reina Lewis (Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, 1995). The ‘Easts’ in the volume’s title has become the signifier for the collection’s commitment to injecting complexity and plurality into contemporary gendered and gendering debates, to rejecting seeming simple binaries and providing nuanced literary readings. We wanted to emphasise how fertile the geographical, historical, factual and imagined sites of porous and permeable boundaries are, and how encounters between the fictional and non-fictional, canonical and popular writing can help us renew our academic practice and challenge those reading lists of university courses limited to traditional choices. We wished to push the debates towards multiplicity, diversity and multidisciplinarity and showcase how these defying qualities of our discipline are the reason why its value lies in providing the tools to understanding humans’ agency and experiences. Thanks to the talent of many VPFA colleagues, the volume celebrates how creative and critical arts contribute to shaping cultures, societies and economies, in the nineteenth century as much as today.
Re-examining Nineteenth-century Easts: Gendered Narratives of Encounter features fourteen chapters and an introduction that outlines the collection’s range of thematic and conceptual foci and the variety of critical and methodological approaches employed by fifteen international scholars whose contributions range from postcolonial, feminist and gender theory to poetics and the geohumanities, from affect and theories of the body to identity politics. Their intellectual and linguistic gifts demonstrate the innovative potential of global scholarship and assert the potential offered by transnational, multilingual and multicultural subjectivities whose epistemological conditions state the enduring limitations of binary opposites.
At diverse stages of their professional development in eleven different countries, the contributors explore the complex and conflicting paradigms of gendered identity politics experienced professionally and personally. Their contributions create dynamic dialogues as the four sections of the volumes move from Hungary, Albania, and Türkiye to Egypt, from East London to India via Syria and Palestine, and then China, the Malay Archipelago and Japan. There are chapters on Baroness Orczy, Anthony Trollope and James Malcolm Rymer, on Mary Edith Durham, Mary Adelaide Walker, Lucie Duff Gordon and Janet Ross, on Amalia Nizzoli and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso, Flora Annie Steel, Margaret Harkness, Isabella Bird and Alicia Little, Pandita Ramabai, Krupabai Satthianadhan and Cornelia Sorabji, on Anna Forbes and Mary Crawford Fraser. Within broader literary, social and cultural contexts, these chapters examine how Victorian and turn-of-the century travellers often conceived the Easts as a foil for ongoing nineteenth-century debates in Britain about gender politics.
At the forthcoming VPFA’s eighteenth annual conference, ‘The Victorians and Their Publics’, which will take place at Liverpool John Moores University (UK) from 6 to 8 July 2026, the co-editors and some of the contributors we will have further opportunities to rekindle the intellectual dialogues captured in the volume at a roundtable on the Victorians and scholarly audiences that aims to reflect on publishing and public engagement by examining how we can connect the public and wider audience to the results of our research. Re-examining Nineteenth-century Easts is an excellent example of how VPFA actively facilitates ways to share our work, passions and value with diverse scholarly and wider audiences. The volume showcases the results of the ways in which VPFA supports our collaborations, friendships and contributions to expanding, diversifying and promoting the relevance of Victorian popular fiction and the Victorians in understanding our present-day, fast-changing challenges.