Study of malaria in literature and culture illuminates the legacies of nineteenth-century colonial medicine within narratives of illness.

This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today.

Writers of imperial fiction in the period 1840-1914 created a strong image of the British Empire that was often confused with the empire as it actually existed. Even in the 1940s, many people in Britain and the British Dominions still accepted the stereotypical view that the British Empire was a highly moral creation. This book studies the literature of imperialism in the Victorian and Edwardian periods to show how this image of empire was created and how it developed such strength. The volume concentrates on the works of major writers of imperialism, such as Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, John Buchan, and G. A. Henty, but also looks extensively at the writings of less familiar figures, such as Robert Ballantyne and W.H.G. Kingston. Many of the texts produced by these writers were books for boys, and they were very popular. They were often given as gifts and were awarded as prizes in schools. The books created a portrait of the British Empire as a place for settlement, the finding of treasure, the strengthening of religious beliefs and moral training, and the operation of codes of behavior for gentlemen. They emphasized courage and the willingness to face death in the service of Britain, and they suggested that the qualities of good citizens were the same as those of good imperialists. This was a comforting and influential concept during a period of imperial acquisition.

Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time is the first book-length treatment of childhood in Edwardian fiction (1901-1914). Challenging common assumptions that the Edwardian period was simply a continuation of the Victorian or the start of the Modern, the collection reveals Edwardian fiction as fascinatingly distinctive, especially in its portrayal of childhood. Conceptions of childhood underwent a cultural seachange in the Edwardian period, seeing the child become central to 'childhood' and childhood central to the Zeitgeist in a way that had not been seen previously and would not endure in the same way after the outbreak of World War I. Gathering international expertise, the volume interweaves studies of single authors with analysis of themes, genres and trends across the period. Innovatively exploring both children's literature and literature for adults, both classics and popular fiction, the collection provides a comprehensive and compelling picture of the Edwardian fictional cult of childhood.

An examination of the development and writers of short fiction from its beginning to the present.