School of English

Professor Rod Edmond

(B.A., B.Phil)

Professor Emeritus  
Email: r.s.edmond@kent.ac.uk  
Interests

I was born in New Zealand and educated at Victoria University Wellington and Merton College Oxford. My first university teaching post was in a history department and I have always worked somewhere in the spaces between literature, history and social theory. My early research interest was in the Victorian period and in Marxist theory, with published work on Gissing, Hardy, Victorian elegies, the social novel, and Marxist and feminist criticism. This culminated in Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (Routledge, 1988).

Since then my interests have been centred in colonial and postcolonial studies, though still with a nineteenth-century emphasis. I published essays on contemporary New Zealand, Pacific and Australian writing (Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Peter Carey, Epeli Hau'ofa) while working on a detailed study of western writing about the Pacific which appeared as Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge U.P., 1997). This latter work also resulted in further published essays on nineteenth-century missionary writing.

More recently I have been investigating colonialism and disease in the modern colonial period (c. 1780-1950), and the main product of this research, Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. This examines how anxiety at the spread of leprosy in Britain's colonies developed into a fear that the disease would return to the metropolitan centre. It investigates the systematic segregation of lepers between 1880 and 1940 and analyses this practice alongside other examples of confinement and isolation, such as the native reservation, in the modern colonial period. The book also discusses representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth century literature.

My continuing interest in the relation between metropole and colony is explored in 'Tom Harrisson in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Bolton 1933-39', published in Writing, Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, edited by Peter Hulme & Russell McDougall (IB Tauris, 2007). This examines how Harrisson's ethnography of the New Hebrides, Savage Civilisation (1937) informed the pioneering social survey work of Mass-Observation that Harrisson co-founded after his return from the Pacific.

Research Supervision

I am interested in supervising research in most areas of 19th and early 20th century literature and culture, both national and imperial.

I am currently supervising 6 research students, 3 working on Victorian subjects and 3 on colonial and postcolonial subjects. These subjects include: the false imprisonment of women in the Victorian period; botanical travel writers in China in the 19th & early 20th century; contemporary Pacific literature in English.

Professional Activities

I am co-general editor of the Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures series and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.

Selected Publications

Books:

  • Affairs of the Hearth: Victorian Poetry and Domestic Narrative (Routledge, 1988)

  • Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin (Cambridge U.P., 1997)

  • Islands in History and Representation (Routledge, 2003, co-ed. with Vanessa Smith), which includes an essay of mine, 'Abject Bodies / Abject Sites: Leper Islands in the High Imperial Era', and a co-authored introductory essay.

  • Leprosy and Empire: A Medical and Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Some Recent Chapters and Articles:

  • 'Home and away: degeneration in imperialist and modernist discourse', in Booth & Rigby (eds.), Modernism and Empire (Manchester U.P.) 2000

  • '"Without the camp": Leprosy and nineteenth-century writing', Victorian Literature and Culture, 29:2, 2001

  • a chapter on Tahiti in Hulme & Youngs (eds) Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002)

  • 'Island Transactions: encounter and disease in the South Pacific', in Felicity Nussbaum (ed.) The Global Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins UP), 2003.

  • 'Returning Fears: Tropical Disease and the Metropolis', in Driver & Martins (eds.), Tropical Views and Visions (University of Chicago Press) 2005

  • 'Writing Islands', in Brown & Irwin (eds.), Literature and Place 1800-2000 (Peter Lang).


School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 823054

Last Updated: 12/05/2011