Solomon's Mines Research Articles

Unsettlement: Destabilizing Development in Southern Africa's Settler Fiction

In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels' characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys inThe Maltese Falcon, 1929/1941

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys in<i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, 1929/1941

International Law and Imperial Romance: Contracts, Sovereignty, and the Rage for Order in Early Haggard

This essay argues that H. Rider Haggard's early and most successful imperial romances, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1886–87), can best be understood in relation to the contemporaneous discourse of international law. Reading the novels alongside the reports of Travers Twiss, the British jurist who gave legal form to the colonial exploits of King Leopold II of Belgium, the essay finds the imperial romance bidding for the juridically expansive plans of the new imperialism. Both novels thus discard the conventional divisions of imperial thought—the binaries between metropole and colony, self and other—insisting instead on universalist visions of order.

Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the US-Mexican Borderlands, 1880–1917

The transnational turn has both expanded and reshaped US-Mexico borderlands history, prying the field from regional matrices and binational binaries. Frontiers in the Gilded Age jumps into this fray as a “transnational frontier history” that entangles US West, Mexican, and African stories, with a primary focus on white male adventurers and their families (p. 3).Andrew Offenburger first discusses what he calls the “western turn South,” as adventurers on earlier US frontiers crossed into Mexico, motivated also by romances of empire in Africa (such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines) (p. 30). They saw Mexico as a new Africa: a treasure house of lost riches, a land ripe for penetration. With parallel mining booms, the United States, Africa, and Mexico were also linked in fact by a “network of adventurers, settlers, miners, and families” (p. 53).Frontiers in the Gilded Age approaches these entanglements through border-crossing stories, linked in idiosyncratic ways. We start with Frederick Russell Burnham—a Minnesotan raised on Victorian adventure tales, who fought Ndebele warriors under Cecil Rhodes in Africa before moving to Mexico to defend US corporate interests against Yaquis. Burnham traveled with his family on a global circuit leading across the US West, southern Africa, Yukon, and West Africa to the Río Yaqui. We leap next over the Sierra Madre to meet James and Gertrude Eaton, who crossed south from the United States to Chihuahua in 1882 as part of a larger, global community of Protestant missionaries. Offenburger asks how family and gender structured mobility across borders while also entangling the Eatons with fellow border crossers in Chihuahua—exiles from the former Boer Republics of Africa.The Boer story takes us back to Africa, to battles against the British empire, where we follow rebels Willem Snyman and Benjamin Viljoen into exile. We follow them first into the United States (where they seek support for their diasporic community by reenacting their role as white African rebels in Wild West shows) and then to Chihuahua, first as colonists under Porfirio Díaz and then as soldiers of fortune after 1910. Benjamin Viljoen is the most developed of Offenburger's characters, a white anti-imperial warrior later steeped, in Wild West shows and as author of his own romanticized tale, in the rhetoric of empire. In the final chapter, we follow him to Sonora as an agent appointed by Francisco Madero to the Río Yaqui (where by this time the likes of Burnham and Haggard have traded their African adventures for new Mexican ventures). As the former freedom fighter begins negotiating with Yaquis on behalf of empire, Offenburger flips the lens one last time—drawing on oral histories of the Yaquis (as migrants and exiles in their own right) to offer a different view of this frontier. Adventurers will come and go as the Yaquis—“persistent, stalwart, resolute”—have the final word (p. 196).This is an engaging, humanized book. Offenburger calls it a frontier history, but the frontier is most visible and convincing as a literary realm that adventurers pilfer in acts of self-fashioning. Frontiers in the Gilded Age is more an entangled history—an idiosyncratic, open-ended view of nineteenth-century crossings and convergences. Offenburger's analysis of frontier rhetoric and self-fashioning is sound, and his parsing of British and US literary strands compelling. What is missing is a rigorous analysis of the central notion of adventure, at a time when it meant different things in romantic tales and actual risky ventures. While some rejected Burnham's tales of adventure as “campfire stories,” Offenburger notes, “there is no question he led a life of adventure” (p. 63). This may be, but without knowing what adventure meant on the ground (as a constellation of high-risk practices at the edges of markets and states), readers may find it hard to fully comprehend the grounded dynamics behind these border-crossing gambles.Offenburger is, in fact, ambivalent about focusing too hard on these white men. Because they “were prone to embodying a hypermasculinity, to denigrating indigenous peoples, and to romanticizing the American frontier,” he strives to “offset their bias” by focusing when possible on women, families, and Indigenous perspectives (p. 9). Especially with the Eatons, he demonstrates why we cannot understand border-crossing networks without attention to women and family. His use of Yaqui oral histories is also effective, so much so that it destabilizes his larger frame. If Indigenous peoples and not adventurous newcomers are to have the final word—that is, if we seek a transnational history beyond empire—then the next step might be to approach the histories of the United States, Mexico, and Africa from multiple Indigenous perspectives. In questioning characters and frames, Frontiers in the Gilded Age may do its most provocative work by suggesting an alternative path forward.

Unknowability and Pleasure: The Case of the Vanishing Referent

Soon after experiencing the Blitz in London, the Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen published short story that has become one of her most admired and best loved writings: Mysterious (Bowen 1999, 728–40). Kor sounds to the ear like the core of something, and indeed in the story figures as an ultimate elsewhere, which the story's heroine, Pepita, yearns to reach. Arthur, Pepita's boy, is on leave, but the lovers have nowhere to go. moon is full, and London eerily, implacably illuminated; as Pepita wanders with Arthur, Kor appears in her mind's eye: an elusive, distant place, its mysteriousness intensified by its name, attached to no known on the globe, the circumflex on the O adding glamour and exoticism to the monosyllable's percussive sound. But the word also conjures London as a ghost city that cannot be known. Bowen's story is spiky, reproducing in its jagged, interrupted scenes and brusque relations the enigma of the imaginary lost and enchanted where Pepita later drifts. Frustrated, exasperated by the littleness of the here and now, sleeping uneasily in her moon-washed room, she dreams of Kor. Kor first appears in the 1886–87 novel She by Rider Haggard, creator of torrid imperialist adventures, including King Solomon's Mines; his virulent fantasies epitomize the passionate repulsion and attraction [End Page 29] that the empire-builders felt for the territories the British and others had invaded and taken possession of, which they often cast as female in their mental imagery. (As Helene Cixous identified in her classic work, The Laugh of the Medusa, women were dark continent too [Cixous, Cohen, and Cohen 1976, 877–78].) Kor is queendom ruled by Ayesha—She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed—who has passed through the fire of eternal life. At the arrival of the explorer hero Leo Vincey, however, She crumbles into dust, her body and her dominion laid to waste by the advent of the white man and the modern world. Bowen read She when she was 12 and, in radio talk in l947, singled out as turning point of her life. The book, she said in radio interview, stands for the first totally violent impact I ever received from print. After She, print was to fill me with apprehension. I was prepared to handle any book like bomb. In this talk for the BBC, Bowen went on to make the crucial point that it was not the woman that attracted her … but the man Holly, the writer [in the story]. It was he [Holly] 'not ever, really, She-who-must-be-obeyed, who controlled the magic'… It was the power of the pen … 'the inventive pen' that was the revelation, the 'power in the cave'…. (Haule 1986, 206). The scholar James M. Haule comments, very perceptively: Though is the writer's power that Bowen acknowledged openly, the image of the female capable of power beyond moral control would not be forgotten. It would return in her work in various guises; but like She, would be always 'veiled, veiled' (1986, 206). The image of Kor communicates heady fin-de-siecle mixture of women, death, desire, beauty, exoticism. Haggard is riffing on the lost cities of the desert in A Thousand and One Nights, and especially the tale called The City of Brass, where everything is stilled around the effigy of its queen, who is mummified, her eye sockets filled with quicksilver so she looks alive; round her bier stand automata that slice off the head of anyone approaching her body to take the jewels that cover her (Lyons and Irwin 2008, 2: 518–548). Bowen likewise explicitly invokes territorial ambitions of empire, but Kor, the matriarchal [End Page 30] ghost city, lies beyond their—our—reach. These associations hover in her story, and the effect is highly charged, thrilling as if live adrenalin were delivered directly from the Haggard novel via Bowen's moonlit scenes into our nervous...

Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) ed. by R.J. Evans, M. De Marre

Reviewed by: Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) ed. by R.J. Evans, M. De Marre Richard Alston Evans, R.J. and De Marre, M. (edd.) 2020. Piracy, Pillage and Plunder in Antiquity: Appropriation and the Ancient World (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies). London and New York: Routledge. Pp. xiv + 245. ISBN 978-1-138-34100-5. £115.00. The focus of this collection is elusive. I began with Clifford Ando's introduction (pp. 1-8) and Seth Richardson's essay on Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia (pp. 9-26) and thought that the book was about bandits and, potentially, pirates. Matthew Trundle (pp. 27-37) provides an essay on mercenary service and Athenian state structures before Richard Evans's treatment of [End Page 268] state finances and raiding with a focus on Syracuse (pp. 38-59). Alex McAuley (pp. 60-83) shifts attention to Seleucid colonisation and issues of identity. Roman Roth's argument follows (pp. 84-96), focusing on coastal colonies as manifestations of Roman naval power and policy. He suggests that pirates lurked in the colonial walls. Aaron Beek (pp. 97-114) considers Rome's habit of calling its enemies 'pirates', seeing them more as mercenaries. This is followed by Stephen Harrison's paper on Tibullus (pp. 115-28), which transitions the volume to a more literary focus, with John Hilton's paper on the rebellious boukoloi in Leucippe and Clitophon (pp. 129-44) and Martine de Marre's consideration of the female Circumcellions, who are in the tradition of morally bad, rural and poor heretics (pp. 145-69). The volume finishes with two papers on reception topics. The first from Eve MacDonald and Sandra Bingham (pp. 170-84) points to tropes of piracy which came to justify imperial expansion in modern North Africa and finally comes Liliana Carrick-Tappeiner's consideration of Classical motifs in the hyper-masculine King Solomon's Mines (pp. 185-202). This shifting focus reflects an essential slipperiness of the subject. The terms 'pirate' or 'bandit' are often applied in modernity and antiquity, but rarely after a carefully consideration of the sociological and political characteristics of the individual or group so labelled. Such terminology is descriptive and invective. One who called Domitian a latro (Plin. Ep. 1.12; Suet. Dom. 12), could not plausibly have been claiming that the Roman emperor conformed to the same sociological categories as the Cilician bandits or the Cretan pirates. But if invective is in play, are we looking principally at elite social discourses tarring the socially and politically marginal with a label reinforcing their externality? For historians of antiquity, the problem is worsened by linguistic issues. Inevitably, we are translating 'bandit' or 'pirate' across multiple languages, sociological settings and moralizing practices. Can the supposed roaming bands of heretics in North Africa be meaningfully compared with Hellenistic mercenaries or Bronze Age herders? Is there anything that connects other than a translated word? Within the comparative historical and anthropological literatures, the category of bandit is not particularly homogeneous. Ando's introductory survey goes back to Brent D. Shaw's work, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s.5 Shaw wrestled with this definitional problem, particularly in his long article on 'Bandits in the Roman Empire', which collated a multiplicity of reports of bandit activity. Lurking behind Shaw's engagement was a cross-disciplinary initiative, 'bandit studies' which drew inspiration from the pioneering work [End Page 269] of Eric Hobsbawm (not in the bibliography here). Hobsbawm invented the terminology of the 'social bandit' drawing on an experience of near contemporary banditry as a form of armed resistance.6 Bandit studies looked to recuperate the stories of low-level, low-class resistance as evidence for mostly agrarian social conflict. For Marxist-inspired historians, the bandit, or the primitive rebel, offered evidence of class struggle before modern political ideology. But as Hobsbawm well knew, the social bandit was not a straightforward figure. In places, the social bandit was mythologized and romanticized. Robin Goodfellow became a very bourgeois bandit in Romantic and modern receptions. In the Mediterranean, the klephts, armatoles, and pallikari of the nineteenth-century Balkans metamorphosed into nationalistic icons, defenders of anti...

Rhetoric of Equating Nature and Native in Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines

The article has selected Henry Rider Haggard's adventure fiction, King Solomon's Mines, for its eco-feminist critical scrutiny. In so doing, it usurps the working definition of the term "ecofeminism" as a tool of inquiry. Then it demonstrates how the rhetoric of empire constructs and mirrors the African continent in general and people and animals in particular. The article primarily exposes the sinister colonial rhetoric of equating nature - land and animals - with women, thus site for exploration and exploitation opens up. The rhetoric becomes an instrument in defining and understanding them for achieving its political ends which leads to unbridled exploitation of both. The analysis further understands the discursive technique of equating nature and natives to establish the European legitimacy for exploitation of native people and nature.

El héroe, el viaje y la construcción de las identidades sociales. Las minas del rey Salomón como modelo

El objetivo de las páginas que siguen es comprender mejor cómo se construyen las identidades sociales y de qué manera esas construcciones influyen sobre la ciudadanía. Para ello, analizaré a un tipo de héroe que surge en Inglaterra a lo largo del siglo XIX: el relacionado con el viaje y la exploración. Es un héroe que asume una tradición milenaria y la desarrolla en una determinada dirección. Su propósito es reforzar una idea del mundo que sirva a los intereses de los grupos sociales que crean o moldean a esa figura heroica y que, a través de ella, aspiran a que esa imagen del mundo se vuelva dominante, impregnando a todos los sectores sociales. Tras apuntar algunas de las más destacadas modalidades de viaje del siglo XIX, recurriré a una obra de ficción, Las minas del rey Salomón (1885), para demostrar cómo la literatura de evasión es capaz de sintetizar todo un conjunto de intereses políticos, económicos y sociales de un grupo social determinado y expandirlos al conjunto de la sociedad.

The Asosa region of western Ethiopia: a golden exploration opportunity

Gold mining has a legendary history in Ethiopia, with Ethiopian mines providing gold to the ancient Egyptian empire and possibly even King Solomon's Mines and the Queen of Sheba. Today, gold occurs in the Pan‐African age schist belt and Tertiary basaltic lavas of the Asosa region of Benishangul‐Gumuz, western Ethiopia. There is widespread artisanal gold production in the Asosa region, with moderate activity by small numbers of local workers producing relatively large amounts of gold. There is a strong relationship between predominantly shear zone‐hosted gold deposits and the Kuluck shear zone, suggesting a structural control on gold accumulation. Gold is also commonly associated with secondary sulphide mineralization and magnetite alteration in Asosa rocks. The source of the gold is thought to be the sub‐volcanic intrusions generated during the subduction of the oceanic crust at the trench island‐arc system, akin to what we see today in epithermal and porphyry type gold systems. Historical workings and anomalous gold concentrations in rock, soil and stream sediments point to a potentially significant untapped gold resource in the Asosa region of western Ethiopia.

“An Old-Fashioned Form of the Zulu Tongue”: A Nineteenth-Century Chaucer Allusion

Abstract In the context of a remark about the dialects of the Zulu language in his novel King Solomon's Mines (1885), H. Rider Haggard made a hitherto unacknowledged allusion to Chaucer.

Rider Haggard: A Triptych of Ambiguities on British Imperialism

Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She were very popular fictions in their time and, as such, were powerful channels for the dissemination of certain ideological tenets. They were written in a short historical period from the Berlin Conference – which organised the European exploitation of Africa (1884–85) – to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee (1887) – that boosted British imperial pride. Some similarities enable us to analyse these Imperial Gothic romances as a unity, bound by a shared ideology. However, this ideology should be read as a unity of tensions. Haggard's fictional works interweave a network of moral, political, racial, and gender issues that, consciously or unconsciously, both support and undermine the British Empire. They are at the heart of an imperial culture that is dialectically destroying itself from within at the peak of its grandeur. Their critical distance from the Other colonised and the coloniser's self-image reveals them as British constructions with paradoxical, self-deconstructive effects. Thus, in the act of creation of the colonised, the colonising culture unveils its terror to itself. This paper is an analysis of these ideological ambiguities from gothic and psychological perspectives.

ROMANCES OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: SPATIALITY, TRADE, AND FORM IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S PACIFIC NOVELS

In the late 1880s, around the timehe decided to settle on the Samoan island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson's writing began to take a strikingly different shape as he attempted to infuse it with the flavor of his new surroundings. “When Stevenson traveled to the margins of the empire,” John Kucich observes, “he suddenly found new ways of organizing his narratives” (59). His novel-length Pacific worksThe Wrecker(1892) andThe Ebb-Tide(1894), both nominally co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, made a marked departure from the dominant models for representing imperial space and themes provided by his ownTreasure Island(1883) and by H. Rider Haggard'sKing Solomon's Mines(1885), and they were generally met by critics with bemusement and disappointment. One reviewer ofThe Ebb-Tidebegan by observing, “It certainly has no claim to a place with those romances which are already ranked among the classics of our tongue,” and concluded sorrowfully: “This is not the Stevenson we love, but it is something to be read and remembered, nevertheless” (qtd. in Maixner 458, 59). While recent critical interest in Stevenson's Pacific fiction has tended to focus on works such as “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and the portrayal of cultural encounter,The Wreckerin particular continues to be held in low regard. As Stephen Arata summarizes,[M]ost critics have dismissed it as overly diffuse, shapeless, and more than a little self-indulgent – the closest thing to a loose baggy monster that Stevenson ever produced. Frank McLynn's assessment is representative: whileThe Wrecker, he says, is “in some ways the oddest and most intriguing” of Stevenson's novels, it is finally a failure because it lacks a “proper story structure” and because “there are far too many diversions and irrelevancies that clog the action.” (par. 7)Yet the fact thatThe WreckerandThe Ebb-Tideare not only Stevenson's two longest Pacific-themed works of fiction, but are also marked by similar structural elements and thematic preoccupations, suggests the value of reconsidering their centrality to his engagement with the increasing western domination of the region in the last decades of the century.

‘King Solomon's mines cannot compare with the money that has been raked in by greyhound racing’: greyhound racing, its critics and the working class, c. 1926–1951

Greyhound racing emerged in Britain in 1926 and, during its first quarter of a century, was subject to institutional middle-class opposition because of the legal gambling opportunities it offered to the working class. Much maligned as a dissipate and impoverishing activity, it was, in fact, a significant leisure opportunity for the working class, which cost little for the minority of bettors involved in what was clearly no more than a ‘bit of a flutter’.

The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard'sKing Solomon's MinesandAllan Quatermain

Both King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887) pursue a quest to regenerate the authority of the English gentleman as ‘the highest rank that a man can reach upon this earth’. The present essay focuses upon Haggard's construction of this ideal of masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Laura Chrisman and Bradley Deane in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard's masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies and human relics. Attention to their thingness entails reflection upon the complexity of textual representations of objects and practical encounters with them as constituent elements of late-Victorian material culture. In addition to exa...

“It Is I Who Have the Power”: Settling Women in Haggard's South African Imaginary

H. Rider Haggard has long been known as the premier writer of the imperial adventure novel, which is described by scholars as predominantly devoid of colonial settlers, particularly women. Yet his most innovative contribution to the genre of adventure fiction is actually his most overlooked: the colonial settler heroine. Reading beyond King Solomon's Mines (1885), She (1887), and Allan Quatermain (1887), male imperial romances that have almost exclusively been allowed to represent Haggard's vast body of work, we encounter female colonial leadership on the South African frontier. An effect of Haggard's anxiety over burgeoning metropolitan female agency and Afrikaner political strength, the heroines of Haggard's female colonial romances enabled the author imaginatively to redirect feminist energy — from metropole to colony, from self (as he saw it) to service, from suffragism to soil. Though they expand the British Empire's, rather than simply their own, sphere of influence, they belie Haggard's imaginative mastery, for in domesticating the empire these heroines transcend domestication, commanding authority far beyond the garden gate. Through an analysis of The Ghost Kings (1908), Haggard's final female colonial romance, this article compares the subgenre to the male imperial romance, demonstrates Haggard's capacity to imagine positive female leadership, and, finally, suggests the limits of that imagination.

"Gladstone bags, shooting boots, and Bryant &amp; May's matches": Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic's Serialization of H. Rider Haggard's She

By 1980s, critical consensus cast Haggard's fiction, and romance revival more generally, uncomplicated expression of a crudely jingoist, racist, and misogynist imperialism (see Bristow 127-46, Gilbert and Gubar 5-46, Katz, and Showalter 78-89). According to this consensus, Haggard and other late-Victorian imperialists also disavowed commercial aspects of empire, its material reality (Katz 108). The of romance, scholars suggested, uncritically absorbed genre's prejudices: for Wendy Katz, Haggard's were the passive watchers of their (130). A more sophisticated has developed since early 1990s, critics have explored tensions underlying late-Victorian romance and imperial discourse more broadly. Haggard's work has enjoyed at least a partial rehabilitation, attention has turned to his novels' complex and ambivalent representation of imperialism (see Arata, Chrisman, and Gold). However, critical discussions of Haggard's representation of imperial commerce have not yet challenged contention that his novels fraudulently idealized British Empire and effaced its material, money-making aspects. Anne McClintock, for example, reads King Solomon's Mines (1885) enacting a disavowal or repression of black productive power (232-57). There has been little of representation of imperial capitalism in Haggard's other novels, including She--a work that, although less obviously engaged in debate about commercial nature of empire, interrogates imperial commerce in interestingly self-reflexive ways. Moreover, recent emphasis on formal fissures of imperialist discourse, in Haggard's work and in romance genre, is sometimes problematic. As Robert Young has noted, such locates ambivalence of imperial discourse not at time of its original articulation and reception but with present day historian or interpreter (152). The original publication and reception of She is strikingly absent, for example, in Barri Gold's recent reading, which announces desire to read against grain and urges that as readers we should create space for our own counterintuitive and potentially subversive interpretations (324-25). The present essay rehistoricizes She and argues that novel's original serial publication illuminates uneasy relationship between romance, commerce, and empire at fin de siecle. At heart of this relationship was a paradox: champions of romance revival offered imperial adventure an antidote to effete world of high capitalism, yet romance form itself was complicit in commodifying empire. For Haggard and his cheerleader, classical scholar, critic, and folklorist Andrew Lang, romance offered a primitive, rejuvenating release from sterility of civilized life: Haggard polemically claimed that romance appeal[ed], not to a class, or a nation, or even to an age, but to all time and humanity at large (About Fiction 180). Lang also championed romance's appeal to a universal, primitive human nature, and he derided reader of realist fiction bald, toothless, highly 'cultured', and addicted to tales of introspective analysis (Realism and Romance 689). Haggard's protagonists are manly heroes, for whom empire represents a revitalizing escape from a commercial, effeminate home life. In Allan Quatermain (1887), Curtis articulates squirearchy's sense of dispossession in industrial Britain and its hankering after a conservative feudal past. Traveling into Central Africa, Curtis and his fellow heroes find this past incarnated in Zu-Vendi, whom he vows to protect from corrupting knowledge of telegraphs, steam, newspapers, [and] universal suffrage (282). Haggard's novels are an attempt to retreat from world of daily newspapers and offer a different kind of literary pabulum: what a fellow-romancer, Robert Louis Stevenson, hailed the real art . …

Adventurous Girls of the British Empire: The Pre-War Novels of Bessie Marchant

Historically, genre of adventure fiction most readily recalls books for boys and male heroes rather than girl readers and protagonists. These include enduringly well-known works such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), early to mid-Victorian boys' stories of Frederick Marryat, W. H. G. Kingston, and R. M. Ballantyne and late-Victorian G. A. Henty's tales (his more than one hundred adventure stories sold in excess of 25 million copies). The novel of adventure at conclusion of nineteenth century recounted tales of male exploration on land or sea, and quests or conquests in real or imagined lands removed from gentility of civilized England. These generic features were aligned with masculine traits of activity and strength, and while girls could and did indeed read boys' adventure books, examples with female protagonists were uncommon in Victorian period. Joseph Bristow argues that between 1870 and 1900, narratives celebrating empire and techniques in teaching reading and writing gradually converged . . . [B]oth inside and outside classroom, there was more and more emphasis on heroic adventure, and this involved a number of shifts in attitude towards juvenile publishing and curriculum design (20–21). The works Bristow refers to were, of course, written by male authors about masculine adventurers. The novels of Bessie Marchant—sometimes called the girls' Henty —began to be published as nineteenth century drew to a close. Her girl heroines act independently in isolated areas in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South America, India, South Africa, Siberia, and Central America. From 1894 until her death in 1941, Marchant wrote more than a 130 novels, many of which celebrated capacity of British or colonial girls to rise to any challenge set before them in rugged.

Versions of the Imperial Romance: "King Solomon's Mines" and "As Minas de Salomão"

Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Eça de Queirós's free translation of it (1889—90) were written at significant moments in the European partition of Africa for both Britain and Portugal: the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 and Lord Salisbury's ultimatum of 11 January 1890 demanding the withdrawal of Portuguese forces from the Shire and Mashonaland. This article, based on the introduction to the forthcoming bilingual critical edition, relates Eça's 'subversive' translation to that context. It highlights Eça's use of a metafictional translator's voice that distances us from Haggard's English heroes and gives altered significance to his Portuguese characters. Linking D. José da Silveira (Haggard's Silvestra) to the Discoveries, the translation reminds the reader of Portugal's 'historic rights', against the principle of 'effective occupation' established in Berlin. Tanto o livro King Solomon's Mines (1885) como a tradução livre que Eça de Queirós dele fez foram escritos em momentos importantes para a Grã-Bretanha e para Portugal no que respeita à repartição de África pelas potências europeias: a Conferência de Berlim de 1884-85 e o Ultimato inglês de 11 de Janeiro de 1890, que exigia a retirada das forças portuguesas do Chire e da Machona. Este artigo, baseado na introdução à edição crítica bilingue (no prelo), coloca a tradução 'subversiva' de Eça nesse contexto. Chama-se a atenção para a utilização, por Eça, de uma voz metaficcional que nos distancia dos heróis ingleses de Haggard, e para a maior importância atribuída às personagens portuguesas. Ao associar a figura de D.José da Silveira (o Silvestra de Haggard) às Descobertas, a tradução faz lembrar os 'direitos históricos' de Portugal, contra o princípio da 'ocupação efectiva' estabelecido em Berlim.

New woman and colonial adventure fiction in Victorian Britain: gender, genre, and empire

Cultural concerns about gender and empire converge in striking and unexpected ways in two popular novel forms of late-Victorian Great Britain. In the 1880s and 1890s, feminist New Woman fiction and colonial adventure stories competed for the sympathies of their readers. While one form questions a system that proclaims male superiority and the right to dominate others, the second celebrates British male victories over savage landscapes, animals, and people. Despite their differences, the author argues, one subgenre is the twin star of the other: each revolves around the other, affected by the other's gravitational pull, as well as by the influence of larger ideological constellations. In each subgenre, shifting gender boundaries are at stake and sexual desire often drives the narrative engine of the novels. two subgenres intersect on topics of pressing cultural debates - Irish Home Rule, women's suffrage, the expanding empire, and a growing human rights movement - and in a number of ways, such as their use of similar metaphors and modes of narration. While empire builders speak of enlarging their territory and creating a wider sphere of action, New Women use the same metaphors for their excursions out of the domestic realm. Richardson's discussion includes Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm - written in 1883 and considered the first New Woman novel, She and King Solomon's Mines - both by the master of the colonial adventure genre H. Rider Haggard, as well as Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus, Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

H. Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily : A Triumph of Translation

H. Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily. A Triumph of Translation Gerald Monsman University of Arizona ARTICULATING THE SIGNIFICANCE of African life before missionary conversions, imperial trade, technology, and annexation had effaced mystery and heroic romance, H. Rider Haggard's Nada the Lily (1892) enthralled Victorians with striking episodes from the precolonial empire of Zululand. Currently emerging as a controversial text of imperialism —recently, even more problematic than King Solomon's Mines ( 1885) or She (1887)—Haggard's saga recounted the bloody reign, assassination , and aftermath of Shaka KaSenzangacona (otherwise in colonial orthography: Chaka, Tyaka, T'shaka, 1780s-1828), the greatest African ruler of the nineteenth century.1 Here also Haggard devised a fictional "prequel" for his near-mythical warrior from Allan Quatermain (1888), Umslopogaas, son of Shaka, who in this narrative is entangled in a doomed love for Nada, a visionary figure of quasi-mystical purity and the "lily" of the Zulus. Fred Fynney, Haggard's campfire buddy from his Natal period, had noted in Zululand and the Zulus (1880), two lectures published a dozen years prior to Nada, that in the popular press in the wake of the Zulu War (1879) "the word 'Zulu' has become almost a household word" but "though we have heard so much of the Zulus, as a matter of fact, little is actually known of their history."2 Quite simply, Haggard's romance was the first popular account of the early Zulu kingdom—that is, before the British partitioning of Zululand in the wake of the Zulu War—and the novel had an immense impact on British perceptions of the native peoples. Probably the proximate origin ofNada lay in the remark of Haggard's friend and collaborator, the anthropologist Andrew Lang, two years before its publication: "How delicious a novel all Zulu, without a white face in it, would be!"3 Accordingly, Haggard produced a fictional biography of Shaka by a Zulu narrator—with no white face except Haggard's 371 Umslopogaas from a photograph taken the day before his death 23 October, 1897 H. Rider Haggard From The Days of My Life: An Autobioraphy. Longmans, Green, 1926 MONSMAN : HAGGARD authorial persona, an outer-frame chronicler, conceivably an unnamed Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines, who observes that he himself "plays no part in this story."4 Haggard's "double-I" narrative device possibly looks forward to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). But of course the white trader who publishes Shaka's history hears it not from a Charlie Marlow-type adventurer but from a native witch-doctor , a prosopographic (because historical data are so scant) Mopo living under the alias of Zweete near Shaka's grave. In the writing οι Nada, Haggard drew extensively on Fynney's pamphlet for scenes that characterized Shaka; particularly, the material of Fynney's first lecture, "The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation," became the fictional content of Haggard 's novel, though this was undoubtedly supplemented with an account by his mentor, Theophilus Shepstone, "Early History of the Zulu-Kafir Race," in John Bird's Annals of Natal (1888).5 Also in his preface toNada, Haggard cites the works of Bishop Henry Callaway and David Leslie as principal sources. From Callaway's The Religious System of the amaZulu (1870) Haggard took material on native weapons, on Mopo's powers as a "diviner," and on Zulu religion, particularly Zulu cosmogonie myths and the deus ex machina figure of Umkulunkulu, Queen of Heaven.6 From Leslie's Among the Zulus andAmatongas (1875), he took the concept of Nada herself ("a Zulu Venus"), material on native "doctors," and borrowed from two Zulu narratives, one literally true ("the artifice by which Umslopogaas obtained admission to the Swazi stronghold") and one fictional ("the fate of the two lovers at the mouth of the cave") which he combined to create the love-story subplot.7 Umslopogaas himself was modeled on a Swazi camp assistant of Shepstone who had told Haggard stories of his people.8 For Shaka's successor , Dingane, Haggard repeats a sinister anecdote: "Of the incident of the Missionary and the furnace of logs, it is impossible to speak so certainly . It came to the writer from the...