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Publications (10 of 67) Show all publications
Donovan, S. & Rubery, M. (2022). Amateur Lunatics: Investigative Journalism, Asylum Reform, and the Undercover Authorship of Lewis Wingfield. Victorian literature and culture, 50(4), 721-755
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Amateur Lunatics: Investigative Journalism, Asylum Reform, and the Undercover Authorship of Lewis Wingfield
2022 (English)In: Victorian literature and culture, ISSN 1060-1503, E-ISSN 1470-1553, Vol. 50, no 4, p. 721-755Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This essay examines the literary career of Anglo-Irish peer Lewis Strange Wingfield (1842-1891) in relation to the rise of investigative journalism and Victorian debates over the treatment of mental illness. Situating his work in the context of the first covert investigations into asylums in Britain and the United States, it focuses on Wingfield's use of disguise to infiltrate a private London asylum for the purpose of researching his novel Gehenna; or, Havens of Unrest (1882). Wingfield's pioneering experiment in undercover authorship, we argue, sheds new light on investigative journalism's impact on both the form and thematics of the nineteenth-century realist novel.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Cambridge University Press, 2022
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-491199 (URN)10.1017/s1060150321000152 (DOI)000899728700005 ()
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2017-02580
Available from: 2022-12-19 Created: 2022-12-19 Last updated: 2023-05-15Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. & Rubery, M. (2021). Doing the Amateur Casual: Victorian Investigative Journalism and the Legacy of James Greenwood's "A Night in the Workhouse". Victorian studies, 63(3), 401-430
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Doing the Amateur Casual: Victorian Investigative Journalism and the Legacy of James Greenwood's "A Night in the Workhouse"
2021 (English)In: Victorian studies, ISSN 0042-5222, E-ISSN 1527-2052, Vol. 63, no 3, p. 401-430Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This essay examines the impact of James Greenwood's “A Night in a Workhouse by an Amateur Casual” (1866) on the emergence of investigative journalism. Whereas the American press is often credited with the invention of undercover reporting, this essay argues that Greenwood's exposé established undercover reporting as a global genre and exerted a lasting influence on both its terminology and methods.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Indiana University PressIndiana University Press, 2021
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-457599 (URN)10.2979/victorianstudies.63.3.04 (DOI)000744665300004 ()
Projects
VR 2017-02580 Fictions of the Real
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2017-02580
Available from: 2022-03-28 Created: 2021-10-30 Last updated: 2024-01-15Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. & Rubery, M. (2021). Emigration with a Vengeance: Undercover Investigative Journalism and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant. Victorian Periodicals Review, 54(4), 527-563
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Emigration with a Vengeance: Undercover Investigative Journalism and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant
2021 (English)In: Victorian Periodicals Review, ISSN 0709-4698, E-ISSN 1712-526X, Vol. 54, no 4, p. 527-563Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-484335 (URN)10.1353/vpr.2021.0043 (DOI)2-s2.0-85137780387 (Scopus ID)
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2017-02580
Available from: 2022-09-09 Created: 2022-09-09 Last updated: 2023-02-08Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (2019). Indexicality and the Newspaper Crosshead in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain. In: Andreas Beck, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Jens Ruchatz (Ed.), Visual Design:: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface (pp. 223-234). Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Indexicality and the Newspaper Crosshead in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain
2019 (English)In: Visual Design:: The Periodical Page as a Designed Surface / [ed] Andreas Beck, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Jens Ruchatz, Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2019, p. 223-234Chapter in book (Other academic)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2019
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-397175 (URN)978-3-86525-696-6 (ISBN)
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2017-02580
Available from: 2019-11-16 Created: 2019-11-16 Last updated: 2020-03-26Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (2017). Love on the Veldt: Romance and Ideology in Gertrude Page’s ‘A Terror That Saved’ (1912). Nordic Journal of English Studies, 16(2), 129-154
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Love on the Veldt: Romance and Ideology in Gertrude Page’s ‘A Terror That Saved’ (1912)
2017 (English)In: Nordic Journal of English Studies, ISSN 1502-7694, E-ISSN 1654-6970, Vol. 16, no 2, p. 129-154Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The following essay offers a close reading of an obscure imperial short story, Gertrude Page’s ‘A Terror That Saved’ (1912), in order to question the assumptions that short fiction about imperial adventure is necessarily masculine, and that short stories with empire settings are primarily vehicles for colonial ideology. When the story in question was written, its author had recently moved from Britain to Rhodesia, a colony whose owner-administrator, the British South Africa Company (BSAC), had strong financial and political incentives for promoting itself to settlers, investors, and the reading public in Britain. Even so, I argue, it would be a mistake to view this tale as being ‘about’ empire in any simple sense, to infer that its huge audience was actively endorsing imperialism, or to equate its generic conventionality and moral conservatism with a static, traditional, and collective worldview. Instead, I draw on Richard Ohmann’s landmark analysis of magazine short stories to sketch an alternative framework within which to understand the popularity of such short stories and to reconstruct the ways in which they were likely read, in particular by women.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Umeå University/Nordic Association of English Studies, 2017
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-332022 (URN)10.35360/njes.408 (DOI)2-s2.0-85032002275 (Scopus ID)
Available from: 2017-10-22 Created: 2017-10-22 Last updated: 2025-05-20Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (2017). The American Serialization of Lord Jim. Journal of European Periodical Studies, 2(2), 3-24
Open this publication in new window or tab >>The American Serialization of Lord Jim
2017 (English)In: Journal of European Periodical Studies, E-ISSN 2506-6587, Vol. 2, no 2, p. 3-24Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This essay presents the discovery of the American serialization of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim in New York’s Evening Telegramin 1903. This ‘lost’ serialization, it argues, invites a new perspective on Conrad’s early career by foregrounding the role of newspaper serialization and syndication in establishing his literary standing. After surveying the principal differences in the respective reading experiences of the periodical versus the book, it concludes by proposing that the prominence of women among Conrad’s first audiences requires us to reassess the basis for his success in North America and elsewhere.

National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-337773 (URN)
Available from: 2018-01-04 Created: 2018-01-04 Last updated: 2023-12-21Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (2017). Underwater Conrad. Conradiana - a Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies, 49(2-3), 47-65
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Underwater Conrad
2017 (English)In: Conradiana - a Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies, ISSN 0010-6356, E-ISSN 1935-0252, Vol. 49, no 2-3, p. 47-65Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This article seeks to challenge current understandings of Conrad's status as a maritime writer by considering his many treatments of the sea not as fictionalized versions of his personal experiences as a sailor but as a sustained attempt to reimagine the sea as a literary object. As the earliest reviews of Typhoon attest, contemporaries regarded Conrad's evocation of the sea as unparalleled in both its strangeness and its verisimilitude. This conundrum, I propose, derives from Conrad's desire to recover for literature a maritime space which, as he saw it, had become disenchanted (in Weber's sense) by its mediation in early twentieth-century culture. Indeed, Typhoon, it is argued, was inspired by and in key respects modelled upon Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), a novel that had been readily available to Conrad in its Polish serialization in Warsaw's Gazeta Polska in 1870–71.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Texas Tech University Press, 2017
Keywords
Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, the sea, Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
National Category
Specific Literatures
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-435771 (URN)10.1353/cnd.2017.0010 (DOI)000621814900005 ()
Available from: 2021-02-26 Created: 2021-02-26 Last updated: 2023-12-07Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (2016). Congo Utopia. English Studies in Africa, 59(1), 63-75
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Congo Utopia
2016 (English)In: English Studies in Africa, ISSN 0013-8398, E-ISSN 1943-8117, Vol. 59, no 1, p. 63-75Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The pairing of Congo and utopia seems wilfully perverse in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism. The Congo Free State was the political outcome of a colonial discourse that represented Africa as the antithesis of civilization, a view subsequently reinforced by the sensational expose by Edmund Morel and others of the regime's own reliance upon coercion and violence. And yet, as this essay shows, the Congo has a long history as the object of utopian thought in fiction. Surveying this overlooked sub-genre of fantasy, I argue that the representation of the Congo by writers such as William Mayo, David Ker, William Le Queux, John Brisben Walker, and especially William Thomas Stead reveals not only the unique status of this colonial space in the European imagination but invites us to revisit the ideological underpinnings of colonial literature more generally.

National Category
Specific Literatures General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-294705 (URN)10.1080/00138398.2016.1173279 (DOI)000384911500007 ()
Available from: 2016-05-27 Created: 2016-05-27 Last updated: 2017-11-30Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (Ed.). (2016). Europe Made in Africa: The Congo Free State in Literature and Culture, 1885–1920. Special Issue of English Studies in Africa (Spring 2016). Routledge
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Europe Made in Africa: The Congo Free State in Literature and Culture, 1885–1920. Special Issue of English Studies in Africa (Spring 2016)
2016 (English)Collection (editor) (Refereed)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Routledge, 2016
Series
English Studies in Africa, ISSN 0013-8398, E-ISSN 1943-8117 ; 59(1)
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-294707 (URN)
Note

Editorship for special issue of English Studies in Africa

Available from: 2016-05-27 Created: 2016-05-27 Last updated: 2025-04-01Bibliographically approved
Donovan, S. (2016). Introduction: Europe Made in Africa. English Studies in Africa, 59(1), 1-5
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Introduction: Europe Made in Africa
2016 (English)In: English Studies in Africa, ISSN 0013-8398, E-ISSN 1943-8117, Vol. 59, no 1, p. 1-5Article in journal, Editorial material (Refereed) Published
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Taylor & Francis Group, 2016
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-294706 (URN)10.1080/00138398.2016.1173270 (DOI)000384911500001 ()
Available from: 2016-05-27 Created: 2016-05-27 Last updated: 2017-11-30Bibliographically approved
Projects
The Rose of Rhodesia Recovered: Colonial Africa on the Silent Screen. / Edited by Stephen Donovan and Vreni Hockenjos. [2008-07601_VR]; Uppsala UniversityFeaturing the Nation: KNOCKNAGOW (1918) and the Film Company of Ireland. [2011-06730_VR]; Uppsala UniversityThe Transnational Colony: The Congo Free State and European Culture [F14-1254:1_RJ]; Uppsala UniversityFictions of the Real: Investigative Journalism and the Novel, 1840-1930 [2017-02580_VR]; Uppsala UniversityCharterland: Rhodesia in British Culture, 1889-1939 [SAB21-0029_RJ]; Uppsala University
Organisations
Identifiers
ORCID iD: ORCID iD iconorcid.org/0000-0002-4335-9975

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