Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies on the production of British expeditionary literature; it is a project of recovery. The book argues that such non-western impact was considerable, that it shaped the discursive and material dimensions of expeditionary literature, and that the impact extends to diverse materials from the expeditionary archive at a scale and depth that critics have previously not acknowledged. The focus of the study falls on Victorian expeditionary literature related to Africa, a continent of accelerating British imperial interest in the nineteenth century, but the study’s findings have the potential to inform scholarship on European expeditionary, imperial, and colonial literature from a wide variety of periods and locations. The book’s analysis is illustrative, not comprehensive. Each chapter targets intercultural encounters and expeditionary literature associated with a specific time period and African region or location. The book suggests that future scholarship – especially in areas such as expeditionary history, geography, cartography, travel writing studies, and book history – needs to adopt much more of a localized, non-western focus if it is to offer a full account of the production of expeditionary discourse and literature.
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About the Author :
Adrian S. Wisnicki is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Faculty Fellow of the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He currently directs Livingstone Online (livingstoneonline.org), a major peer-reviewed digital humanities project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Print publications include Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel (Routledge, 2008), and articles in Victorian Studies, Studies in Travel Writing, History in Africa, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and elsewhere.
Review :
"The broader insights generated by this comparative approach are precisely what makes the book a must-read for historical geographers working on the his-tory of travel, exploration and empire."
- Edward Armston-Sheret, Royal Holloway, London, UK, Journal of Historical Geography
"It is rare to read a work as rigorously interdisciplinary in its methods and objectives as Adrian Wisnicki’s Fieldwork of Empire. Making skillful use of evidence and insights from African history (including oral history), anthropology, cartography, historical geography, and literature, this is a work that defies disciplinary categorization. Although the author holds a PhD in English, teaches in an English department, and addresses issues related to ‘expeditionary literature’, as announced in the subtitle, he has written a book that is relevant and revealing to scholars in a variety of fields."
- Dane Kennedy, Journal of Victorian Culture 25:3 (July 2020): 468-70
"This book offers precisely the kind of dense, complex, intercultural reading of Victorian travelers, their journeys, and their literary and cartographic productions that scholars of travel writing on Africa have envisioned since the boom in such criticism began in the late 1980s and early 1990s."-
- Laura Franey, Review 19 (2020)
"Wisnicki offers a clear, capacious, meticulously researched and supported argument that shows not only the strong impress of European epistemologies upon the African continent, but also the unexpected (and sometimes highly determinative) influence of Indigenous African forces upon European mapping of and discourse about Central Africa."
- John McBratney, Victorian Studies 62:3 (Spr. 2020)
"Fieldwork of Empire complements new studies of indigenous interactions with and responses to the colonial imposition, which are increasingly highlighting the global, national and local agencies, participants and audiences which were integral to the production of identities, spaces, material cultures, archives and "knowledge" in and of Africa during the nineteenth century. [...] Wisnicki manages to weave together an insightful tapestry of the human influences that contributed to the making of Victorian expeditionary literature of Africa, illuminating the neglected, but the fundamental role of local, non‐Western individuals and populations in dynamic processes of exchange and contestation."
- Jared McDonald, Historia 64:2 (2019)
"Fieldwork of Empire therefore provides powerful arguments in favour of the need to ground new studies of Victorian exploration in local contexts, to the extent that the relationship in the field between British explorers and "subalterns" can be reconsidered and general assumptions about intercultural encounters can be challenged."
- Guillaume Didier, Société d’Étude de la Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone (2019)
