Ann C. Colley's Books

Victorians in the Mountains

Sinking the Sublime

By: Ann C. Colley

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In her compelling book, Ann C. Colley examines the shift away from the cult of the sublime that characterized the early part of the nineteenth century to the less reverential perspective from which the Victorians regarded mountain landscapes. And what a multifaceted perspective it was, as unprecedented numbers of the Victorian middle and professional classes took themselves off on mountaineering holidays so commonplace that the editors of Punch sarcastically reported that the route to the summit of Mont Blanc was to be carpeted. In Part One, Colley mines diaries and letters to interrogate how everyday tourists and climbers both responded to and undercut ideas about the sublime, showing how technological advances like the telescope transformed mountains into theatrical spaces where tourists thrilled to the sight of struggling climbers; almost inevitably, these distant performances were eventually reenacted at exhibitions and on the London stage. Colley's examination of the Alpine Club archives, periodicals, and other primary resources offers a more complicated and inclusive picture of female mountaineering as she documents the strong presence of women on successful expeditions in the latter half of the century. In Part Two, Colley turns to John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose writings about the Alps reflect their feelings about their Romantic heritage and shed light on their ideas about perception, metaphor, and literary style. Colley concludes by offering insights into the ways in which expeditions to the Himalayas affected people's sense of the sublime, arguing that these individuals were motivated as much by the glory of Empire as by aesthetic sensibility. Her ambitious book is an astute exploration of nationalism, as well as theories of gender, spectacle, and the technicalities of glacial movement that were intruding on what before had seemed inviolable.

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Page Count

266

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317001990

ISBN 13

9781317001997

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Walking with Euclid

By: Ann C. Colley

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Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Walking with Euclid

By: Ann C. Colley

Ann Colley reveals how geometry, both Euclidean and non-Euclidean, channelled and shaped Coleridge's thought and his perception of nature.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

100927175X

ISBN 13

9781009271752

Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps

By: Ann C. Colley

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Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps

By: Ann C. Colley

What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomists and zoologist, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and portraying of animal skins to show their importance as trophies of empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display skins to promote and glorify Britain’s colonial achievements, Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized more by chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear’s commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s extensive collection challenge the colonial’s or collector’s commanding gaze, while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of skin as a locus of memory and touch where one’s past can be traced in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins.

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Page Count

219

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1134766459

ISBN 13

9781134766451

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

By: Ann C. Colley

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Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

By: Ann C. Colley

In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas fiction, as well as into the particulars and complications of living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society and from other sources, such as the Royal Geographical Society (London), the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), and the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), Colley examines the intricate nature of Robert Louis Stevenson's relation to imperialism. In particular, she investigates Stevenson's complex relationship to the missionary culture that surrounded him during the last six years of his life (1888-1894), revealing hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's experiences while he was cruising among the South Sea islands, and later while he was a resident colonial in Samoa. Beginning with a history of the missionaries in the Pacific that reveals Stevenson's criticism of, yet ultimate support for, their work, and demonstrates how these attitudes helped shape his South Sea fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination constitutes a major work of reconstruction from archival sources. Subsequent chapters focus on Stevenson's struggles with personal and cultural identity in the South Seas, and his interest in photography, panoramas, and magic lantern shows, revealing Stevenson's sensitivity to the ways light plays upon darkness to create meaning. In addition, Stevenson's serious commitment to political issues and his thoughts about power and nationhood are explored. Finally, Stevenson's recollections of his childhood are engaged not only to suggest an unacknowledged source (the juvenile missionary magazines) for A Child's Garden of Verses, but also to illuminate the generous reach of his imagination that exceeds the formulae of the missionary culture and the boundaries of the colonial construct.

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Page Count

372

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351902776

ISBN 13

9781351902779

The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

A Memoir

By: Ann C. Colley

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The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

A Memoir

By: Ann C. Colley

One summer afternoon in northern England in 1946, when Ann Colley was a child, she met a man from Czechoslovakia named Dr. Novak. This encounter launched her lifelong fascination with Central and Eastern Europe, one that resulted in her spending two years, in 1995 and 2000, teaching at universities in Poland and Ukraine. In The Odyssey and Dr. Novak, Colley records personal experiences, interactions with colleagues, and descriptions of the landscape, creating a composite portrait of these countries at a time when each is struggling to chart its course after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. She recalls moments that are disturbing, absurd, discordant, frustrating, humorous, and endearing—a missing parrot flying in through the window; a robber on a train threatening her life; clouds of smoke from Chernobyl hanging over Kiev. Colley’s journey ends with her return to the figure of Dr. Novak when she searches in the archives of the Harvard Divinity School Library for letters sent from Prague in 1945—letters which, just like her memoir, speak of a past that pursues the present.

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Page Count

234

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1631523449

ISBN 13

9781631523441

The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

A Memoir

By: Ann C. Colley

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The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

A Memoir

By: Ann C. Colley

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234

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Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1631523449

ISBN 13

9781631523441

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Walking with Euclid

By: Ann C. Colley

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Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Walking with Euclid

By: Ann C. Colley

Ann Colley reveals how geometry, both Euclidean and non-Euclidean, channelled and shaped Coleridge's thought and his perception of nature.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

100927175X

ISBN 13

9781009271752

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

By: Ann C. Colley

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Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

By: Ann C. Colley

In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas fiction as well as into the particulars and complications of living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society, the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the Royal Geographical Society (London), Colley examines Stevenson's complex involvement with the colonial imagination. Her exploration of the missionary culture surrounding Robert Louis Stevenson during the last six years of his life (1888-1894) uncovers hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's multi-layered fiction as well as his experiences in the South Seas, both as a traveler and as a resident colonial in Samoa. This context offers a new and important approach to Stevenson's views on memory, alienation, power, class, and nationhood.

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Page Count

228

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351902784

ISBN 13

9781351902786

Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture

By: A. Colley

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Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture

By: A. Colley

This book is about a group of Victorian British writers and artists (Darwin, Stevenson, Gaskell, Ruskin, Pater, Brown and Turner) whose work emerges from recollection and whose texts embody the experience of nostalgia. The study concentrates on the longing for a past that traverses the span of these writers' and artists' own lifetime. It examines their particular experience of the nostalgic moment and provides an occasion to re-examine the idea of nostalgia and to reflect on the act of recollection.

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Page Count

218

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312216645

ISBN 13

9780312216641

Book's by Ann C. Colley

Victorians in the Mountains

Victorians in the Mountains

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

The Odyssey and Dr. Novak

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination

Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture

Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture

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