Ji-Yoon Choi

Abstract This article re‐examines John Barrow's Travels in China (1804), an account of the Macartney embassy seen as having contributed to the emergence of Britain's derogatory attitude to China. By drawing connections between his cross‐cultural comparisons and conjectural history, it demonstrates how Barrow employs China's cultural differences not only to sophisticate stadial theory but also to present a complex view of Chinese civilisation that does not lend itself to an evaluative judgement o

This article examines the utopian possibilities of the plague in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). Contrary to literary critics who employ the immense destruction the plague causes in the novel to read it as a deeply pessimistic text, which they interpret as Shelley’s skeptical response to the optimism found in the early progressive works of Romantic writers, I suggest Shelley nonetheless maintains her faith in the future fate of humanity, which is brought into greater relief when one compares

Despite her illegitimate birth, Harriet Smith features prominently in Emma (1816), thus making her an anomaly in Jane Austen’s fiction. Yet she has not received much critical attention, which I suggest can be attributed to the paranoid critical orientation that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as the dominant mode of literary studies. In order to redress such critical neglect, this article seeks to perform what Sedgwick calls a reparative reading of Harriet by focusing on her collecting practice

This dissertation examines how the eighteenth-century British travel narrative can have a genre-like coherence while at the same time consisting of great formal variation. A mode of narration that was immensely popular due to Britain’s maritime exploration of the world, it generated a wide range of representations, making it difficult to identify a common set of formal conventions. I address this problem by focusing on narrative epistemology, a defining characteristic of the travel narrative, so

While Mary Davys is considered to have played a significant role in the development of the English novel, she has received little literary attention, most of which is focused on her last three novels. This article seeks to redress such a critical imbalance by examining one of her earlier works, The Merry Wanderer (1725), a partly autobiographical text in which Davys relates her travels through rural England after the death of her husband. First published as The Fugitive in 1705, it was revised a

This article examines Daniel Defoe’s use of mobility to imagine the British nation in his domestic travel narrative A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26). While many critics have noted his participation in the national project of imagining a unified Britain, which was of great importance due to the 1707 Act of Union, this article explores the liberating (or destabilizing) effect that Defoe’s travels have on the construction of a British national identity. After discussing how

While Mary Davys is considered to have played a significant role in the development of the English novel, she has received little literary attention, most of which is focused on her last three novels. This article seeks to redress such a critical imbalance by examining one of her earlier works, The Merry Wanderer (1725), a partly autobiographical text in which Davys relates her travels through rural England after the death of her husband. First published as The Fugitive in 1705, it was revised a

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) is widely recognized for its critical engagement with the culture of sensibility. However, Sterne’s sentimental portrayal of animals has not received much critical attention. While critics tend to either dismiss the animals or treat them as symbols reflecting human concerns, a closer examination reveals a more nuanced depiction that challenges the dominant view of animals as inferior beings that are fundamentally different f

This article examines the literary significance of the “strange” inventions in Daniel Defoe’s fantastic lunar narrative The Consolidator. While critics often comment that these fantastic devices help Defoe’s narrator better understand the problems plaguing the English government in their discussion of the text as a political allegory, they rarely discuss exactly how these machines grant their users such enhanced insight, which I examine by relating them to Defoe’s literary techne. In addition to

This article examines the significance of the frame narrative’s location, the Arctic, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It extends recent ecocritical analyses of Frankenstein to consider how Shelley projects her fears about future climate change upon the Arctic by envisaging it as a dystopia, in which humanity cannot exist, thereby anticipating her later post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826). I argue that Shelley specifically depicts the Arctic as a place of utter “desolation,” onto wh