Tamara S Wagner
Biographic Data
| ID | 3433721 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tamara S Wagner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tamara S |
| FAMILY NAME | Wagner |
| SIGNATURE | WAGNER T S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nanyang Technological University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7537-9815 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Accidents at Home in the Victorian Novel: Auguries, Probability, and Charlotte Yonge's Household Advice
This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting conce…
Sensationalising Victorian domestic ecology: From Scrooge’s coals to sweetly-scented chemicals
The Mother-Sister of Victorian Fiction: Domestic Compromises and Replaceable Heroines
This article critically examines the figure of the “mother-sister” in Victorian popular fiction. Sisters whose main function in the household comprises mothering their siblings, combines several narrative possibilities in nineteenth-century fiction, while constructively complicating the representation of domestic work. Whereas canonical fiction depicts sisters taking care of motherless siblings more often than their general absence from critical …
That Was the Blunder’: Moving House in Gaskell’s North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–5) contains a structurally and thematically important narrative about moving house that prompts a much-needed recalibration of how we can read representations of domestic labour in Victorian fiction. Gaskell explores how homemaking is changing and perhaps needs to change in a modern, industrial world and how this can be expressed by dramatising the practicalities of house-moving. A close look at the repre…
Risk-management at home: Domestic accidents and Mrs. Henry Wood’s household advice
This paper investigates the representation of domestic accidents in popular Victorian fiction. Taking Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862) as a case study, I discuss how accidents at home signpost changing reactions to risk and risk-management as much as to the work of managing a household. Women’s writing is more likely to depict the home as the site of domestic labour, as a place of worry even, rather than as a stable space that s…
Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette
This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strang…
Past Spaces and Revisits in Transnational Poetry: The Sojourning Returnee of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Do You Live In
This essay explores the shifting vantage-point of a temporary returnee and an observant sojourner in the poetry of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Situating Lim’s recent collection, Do You Live In? (2015) both in the context of her renewed migrations to different places in Asia and within a widening transnational project of reconceptualizing traditional dichotomies of the diasporic, a critical discussion of her latest poetry enables us to trace how reflect…
The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950
This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained …
Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
The Sensational Victorian Nursery: MRS Henry Wood's Parenting Advice
Parenting advice has become a booming industry as well as probably one of the most contested discourses. Its proliferation and continued diversification are often considered a particularly contemporary problem, yet the virulent marketing of “expert” advice on childrearing has its roots as much in the nineteenth-century publishing industry as in the overlapping Victorian cults of domesticity, maternity, and childhood. The nineteenth century saw an…
Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English
In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of chara…
The New Chum girl: Upending Colonial Clichés in Lilian Turner's Emigration Novel
This essay analyses Lilian Turner's Three New Chum Girls (1910) to show how settler authors played with colonial clichés as part of a critical reaction to shifting imperialist and nationalist ideologies at the turn of the century. In particular, Turner redefines the derogatory colonial term “new chum”—commonly used to describe a recent emigrant in the settler colonies—to suggest what the welcome of new arrivals ought to be like. Yet if her delibe…
Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand
Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under - Tamara S Wagner 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad - Lesa Scholl 2 'Hasten to the Land of Promise': The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature - Diana C Archibald 3 'Ever so Many Partings Welded Together': Serial Settlement and Great Expectations - Jude Piesse 4 'The Heavens Were on Fire': Incendiarism and the Defen…
Victorian Failed Emigration and the Superfluity Debates: Elizabeth Murray's Ella Norman
Journal Article Victorian Failed Emigration and the Superfluity Debates: Elizabeth Murray's Ella Norman Get access Tamara S. Wagner Tamara S. Wagner 1Nanyang Technological University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 March 2015, Pages 101–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.990729 Published: 01 March 2015
Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim: Victorian Transoceanic Studies Beyond the Postcolonial Matrix
the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined th…
The Colonial Girlâ s Own Papers
The Reluctant Settler's Narrative Delay: Weaning On Board Ship in Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay
The domestic novel's antipodes: False heirs and reclaimed returnees in Charlotte Yonge's My Young Alcides
This article reassesses nineteenth-century representations of Britain's geographical “antipodes” by looking at the figure of the returnee. While mid-Victorian sensation fiction expressed a redirected imperial panic by producing popular impostor plots, the resulting typecasting of the antipodal returnee as an intrinsically threatening figure increasingly prompted authors to react critically to this easy sensationalisation. Simultaneously, a new cr…
Speculators at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Market Villains and New Paper Fictions
In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875) , the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they…
Speculations on Inheritance and Anne Brontë's Legacy for the Victorian Custody Novel
Boutique Multiculturalism and the Consumption of Repulsion: Re-Disseminating Food Fictions in Malaysian and Singaporean Diasporic Novels
Food metaphors are among the most vexing clichés of postcolonial and diasporic fiction. But even as they help to promote the marketability of the multicultural, their renegotiation in more self-reflective writing has recently begun to engender new food fictions that capitalize on repulsion as a form of resistance to this demand for self-Orientalization. The curious retention of a marketable exoticizing of food that is indeed as often symbolic, to…
Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction
After another Round of Tissues: Bad Time'' Fiction and the Amy Tan-Syndrome in Recent Singaporean Novels
Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Boutique Multiculturalism and the Consumption of Repulsion: Re-Disseminating Food Fictions in Malaysian and Singaporean Diasporic Novels
Food metaphors are among the most vexing clichés of postcolonial and diasporic fiction. But even as they help to promote the marketability of the multicultural, their renegotiation in more self-reflective writing has recently begun to engender new food fictions that capitalize on repulsion as a form of resistance to this demand for self-Orientalization. The curious retention of a marketable exoticizing of food that is indeed as often symbolic, to…
Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction
Risk-management at home: Domestic accidents and Mrs. Henry Wood’s household advice
This paper investigates the representation of domestic accidents in popular Victorian fiction. Taking Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862) as a case study, I discuss how accidents at home signpost changing reactions to risk and risk-management as much as to the work of managing a household. Women’s writing is more likely to depict the home as the site of domestic labour, as a place of worry even, rather than as a stable space that s…
Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim: Victorian Transoceanic Studies Beyond the Postcolonial Matrix
the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined th…
Speculators at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Market Villains and New Paper Fictions
In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875) , the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they…
After another Round of Tissues: Bad Time'' Fiction and the Amy Tan-Syndrome in Recent Singaporean Novels
Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction
Speculations on Inheritance and Anne Brontë's Legacy for the Victorian Custody Novel
Boutique Multiculturalism and the Consumption of Repulsion: Re-Disseminating Food Fictions in Malaysian and Singaporean Diasporic Novels
Food metaphors are among the most vexing clichés of postcolonial and diasporic fiction. But even as they help to promote the marketability of the multicultural, their renegotiation in more self-reflective writing has recently begun to engender new food fictions that capitalize on repulsion as a form of resistance to this demand for self-Orientalization. The curious retention of a marketable exoticizing of food that is indeed as often symbolic, to…
Speculators at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Market Villains and New Paper Fictions
In THE WAY WE LIVE NOW (1875) , the Melmottes’ origins remain a mystery that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Few of Augustus Melmotte's business partners venture to inquire too closely into the specious public faith in his financial integrity even as they prepare to extract the promising output of his highly speculative enterprises. On the contrary, a suspicion that their seemingly stable investments are as unsafe as they are spurious, that they…
The domestic novel's antipodes: False heirs and reclaimed returnees in Charlotte Yonge's My Young Alcides
This article reassesses nineteenth-century representations of Britain's geographical “antipodes” by looking at the figure of the returnee. While mid-Victorian sensation fiction expressed a redirected imperial panic by producing popular impostor plots, the resulting typecasting of the antipodal returnee as an intrinsically threatening figure increasingly prompted authors to react critically to this easy sensationalisation. Simultaneously, a new cr…
The Reluctant Settler's Narrative Delay: Weaning On Board Ship in Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay
The Colonial Girlâ s Own Papers
Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand
Introduction: Victorian Domestic Fiction Down Under - Tamara S Wagner 1 Retracing Domestic Space: English National Identity in Harriet Martineau's Homes Abroad - Lesa Scholl 2 'Hasten to the Land of Promise': The Influence of Emigrant Letters on Dickens's Life and Literature - Diana C Archibald 3 'Ever so Many Partings Welded Together': Serial Settlement and Great Expectations - Jude Piesse 4 'The Heavens Were on Fire': Incendiarism and the Defen…
Victorian Failed Emigration and the Superfluity Debates: Elizabeth Murray's Ella Norman
Journal Article Victorian Failed Emigration and the Superfluity Debates: Elizabeth Murray's Ella Norman Get access Tamara S. Wagner Tamara S. Wagner 1Nanyang Technological University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 March 2015, Pages 101–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.990729 Published: 01 March 2015
Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim: Victorian Transoceanic Studies Beyond the Postcolonial Matrix
the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined th…
Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English
In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of chara…
The New Chum girl: Upending Colonial Clichés in Lilian Turner's Emigration Novel
This essay analyses Lilian Turner's Three New Chum Girls (1910) to show how settler authors played with colonial clichés as part of a critical reaction to shifting imperialist and nationalist ideologies at the turn of the century. In particular, Turner redefines the derogatory colonial term “new chum”—commonly used to describe a recent emigrant in the settler colonies—to suggest what the welcome of new arrivals ought to be like. Yet if her delibe…
The Sensational Victorian Nursery: MRS Henry Wood's Parenting Advice
Parenting advice has become a booming industry as well as probably one of the most contested discourses. Its proliferation and continued diversification are often considered a particularly contemporary problem, yet the virulent marketing of “expert” advice on childrearing has its roots as much in the nineteenth-century publishing industry as in the overlapping Victorian cults of domesticity, maternity, and childhood. The nineteenth century saw an…
The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950
This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained …
Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Past Spaces and Revisits in Transnational Poetry: The Sojourning Returnee of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Do You Live In
This essay explores the shifting vantage-point of a temporary returnee and an observant sojourner in the poetry of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Situating Lim’s recent collection, Do You Live In? (2015) both in the context of her renewed migrations to different places in Asia and within a widening transnational project of reconceptualizing traditional dichotomies of the diasporic, a critical discussion of her latest poetry enables us to trace how reflect…
Becoming Foreign in the Victorian Novel: International Migration in Little Dorrit and Villette
This article analyses the representation of migrant workers in Victorian fiction. While exploring the seldom-discussed experience of such migrants, I argue that in the fiction of the time, migration for work outside of the empire expresses the experience of individual isolation as the result of increasing urban anonymity as well as of global exchanges. The figure of the migrant thereby literalizes modern isolation in an emergent society of strang…
Risk-management at home: Domestic accidents and Mrs. Henry Wood’s household advice
This paper investigates the representation of domestic accidents in popular Victorian fiction. Taking Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862) as a case study, I discuss how accidents at home signpost changing reactions to risk and risk-management as much as to the work of managing a household. Women’s writing is more likely to depict the home as the site of domestic labour, as a place of worry even, rather than as a stable space that s…
The Mother-Sister of Victorian Fiction: Domestic Compromises and Replaceable Heroines
This article critically examines the figure of the “mother-sister” in Victorian popular fiction. Sisters whose main function in the household comprises mothering their siblings, combines several narrative possibilities in nineteenth-century fiction, while constructively complicating the representation of domestic work. Whereas canonical fiction depicts sisters taking care of motherless siblings more often than their general absence from critical …
That Was the Blunder’: Moving House in Gaskell’s North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–5) contains a structurally and thematically important narrative about moving house that prompts a much-needed recalibration of how we can read representations of domestic labour in Victorian fiction. Gaskell explores how homemaking is changing and perhaps needs to change in a modern, industrial world and how this can be expressed by dramatising the practicalities of house-moving. A close look at the repre…
Accidents at Home in the Victorian Novel: Auguries, Probability, and Charlotte Yonge's Household Advice
This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting conce…
Sensationalising Victorian domestic ecology: From Scrooge’s coals to sweetly-scented chemicals
History (17 works) · Art (15 works) · History (13 works) · Literature (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Narrative (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)