Patrick Brantlinger

The reading lesson : the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth-century British fiction

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Case of the Poisonous Book 2. Gothic Toxins: The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, and Caleb Williams 3. The Reading Monster 4. How Oliver Twist Learned to Read, and What He Found 5. Poor Jack, Poor Jane: Representing the Working Class and Women in Early and Mid-Victorian Novels 6. Cashing in on the Real in Thackeray and Trollope 7. Novel Sensations of the 1860s 8. The Educations of Edward Hyde and Edwin Reardon 9. Overbooked versus Bookless Futures in Late-Victorian Fiction Notes Works Cited Index

The road to Armageddon : the martial spirit in English popular literature, 1870-1914

The Lost Generation has held the imagination of those who succeeded them, partly because the idea that modern war could be romantic, generous, and noble died with the casualties of that war. From this remove, it seems almost perverse that Britons, Germans, and Frenchmen of every social class eagerly rushed to the fields of Flanders and to misery and death. In The Road to Armageddon Cecil Eby shows how the widely admired writers of English popular fiction and poetry contributed, at least in England, to a romantic militarism coupled with xenophobia that helped create the climate that made World War I seem almost inevitable. Between the close of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the opening guns of 1914, the works of such widely read and admired writers as H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Rupert Brooke, as well as a host of now almost forgotten contemporaries, bombarded their avid readers with strident warnings of imminent invasions and prophecies of the collapse of civilization under barbarian onslaught and internal moral collapse. Eby seems these narratives as growing from and in turn fueling a collective neurosis in which dread of coming war coexisted with an almost loving infatuation with it. The author presents a vivid panorama of a militant mileau in which warfare on a scale hitherto unimaginable was largely coaxed into being by works of literary imagination. The role of covert propaganda, concealed in seemingly harmless literary texts, is memorably illustrated.

Missionaries and Cannibals in Nineteenth‐century Fiji

This article examines the controversies concerning both customary cannibalism and missionary ethnography. Focusing on Fiji, it supports the conclusions of Marshall Sahlins about both issues, demonstrating that the attempts of William Arens, Gananath Obeyesekere and others to debunk “cannibal talk” are flawed in several ways. The eyewitness testimony of numerous missionaries and non‐missionaries in Fiji from the 1830s to the 1870s provides an extensive evidentiary basis for examining both controversies. Some of the testimony comes from indigenous witnesses, moreover, including Thakombau, who became known—or notorious—to Europeans as “the King of the Cannibals”. The article briefly recounts Thakombaus role in the processes of conversion and colonization. Two key texts that are closely analyzed as examples of missionary ethnography are Reverend Joseph Waterhouses The King and People of Fiji and Reverend Thomas Williamss Fiji and the Fijians.