Caitlin Vandertop
Biographic Data
| ID | 3784487 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caitlin Vandertop |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caitlin |
| FAMILY NAME | Vandertop |
| SIGNATURE | VANDERTOP C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Reading Commodities: An Introduction
If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of char…
Commodities and Literature
Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opiu…
The land has eyes and teeth: Copra plantations, gothic fertility, and literary genealogies in Oceania
This essay examines literary representations of the Pacific copra frontier. Comparing R.L. Stevenson’s gothic novella about a “tabooed” copra trader, “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), to Albert Wendt’s multigenerational novel about a “cursed” plantation owner in Samoa, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), it situates the texts’ shared gothic anxieties about paternity, fertility and genealogy within the context of the colonial plantation’s own threat to …
A Swamp Becomes the Capital: Urban ecologies of empire in Suva (Fiji)
The nineteenth-century expansion of colonial port cities onto land reclaimed from the ocean generated both material and conceptual shifts in the relations between land and water. Focusing on the history of Suva, which was established as the British capital of Fiji in 1882, this article shows how, despite colonial accounts of successful efforts to 'drain the swamp', the city's history has been narrativised as a series of urban disasters. From loca…
Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature
While literary modernism is often associated with Euro-American metropolises such as London, Paris or New York, this book considers the place of the colonial city in modernist fiction. From the streets of Dublin to the shop-houses of Singapore, and from the botanical gardens of Bombay to the suburbs of Suva, the monumental landscapes of British colonial cities aimed to reinforce empire's universalising claims, yet these spaces also contradicted a…
Ghosts of the plantation: Sugar, narrative energetics and gothic ecologies in Fiji
This article examines gothic representations of the sugarcane plantation in literature from Fiji. Focusing on Indo-Fijian texts, including Totaram Sanadhya’s ‘The Story of the Haunted Line’ (1922) and Subramani’s The Fantasy Eaters (1988), it shows how ghostly encounters and uncanny returns evoke not only the haunting memories of indenture but also the violent rushes and energy-depleting crashes generated by sugar. As a ‘vampire crop’, sugar is s…
Architectures of the invisible hand: Envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad's Singapore
In recent years, critical attention has shifted away from the subject of Conrad’s imperial politics and towards his representation of late nineteenth-century global capitalism, which extends panoramically from the business houses of London, Brussels and San Francisco to commodity frontiers as diverse as Malay tobacco plantations, African ivory lands and Latin American silver mines. This paper explores Conrad’s engagement with capitalism and its r…
Opium cities, carbon routes: World-ecological prehistory in Amitav Ghosh's Hong Kong
This article situates Amitav Ghosh’s thesis of anthropocenic modernity as a “great derangement” within the context of the British colonial city and its environmental vulnerabilities. Showing how Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies [2008], River of Smoke [2011] and Flood of Fire [2015]) highlights the appropriation of natural resources by financial markets, the article reads Ghosh’s narratives of magically altered landscapes – and the strange coi…
The Colonies in Concrete: Walter Benjamin, Urban Form and the Dreamworlds of Empire
While a number of scholars have sought to lift Walter Benjamin's urban writing out of its original European context and to appropriate it for studies of postcolonial cities and cultures, few have attempted to situate Benjamin's original analyses of urban consumer culture within the wider context of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. Yet Benjamin's montage of the Parisian capital in the Arcades Project captures a key moment in the int…
Opium cities, carbon routes: World-ecological prehistory in Amitav Ghosh's Hong Kong
This article situates Amitav Ghosh’s thesis of anthropocenic modernity as a “great derangement” within the context of the British colonial city and its environmental vulnerabilities. Showing how Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies [2008], River of Smoke [2011] and Flood of Fire [2015]) highlights the appropriation of natural resources by financial markets, the article reads Ghosh’s narratives of magically altered landscapes – and the strange coi…
The Colonies in Concrete: Walter Benjamin, Urban Form and the Dreamworlds of Empire
While a number of scholars have sought to lift Walter Benjamin's urban writing out of its original European context and to appropriate it for studies of postcolonial cities and cultures, few have attempted to situate Benjamin's original analyses of urban consumer culture within the wider context of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. Yet Benjamin's montage of the Parisian capital in the Arcades Project captures a key moment in the int…
Opium cities, carbon routes: World-ecological prehistory in Amitav Ghosh's Hong Kong
This article situates Amitav Ghosh’s thesis of anthropocenic modernity as a “great derangement” within the context of the British colonial city and its environmental vulnerabilities. Showing how Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (Sea of Poppies [2008], River of Smoke [2011] and Flood of Fire [2015]) highlights the appropriation of natural resources by financial markets, the article reads Ghosh’s narratives of magically altered landscapes – and the strange coi…
Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature
While literary modernism is often associated with Euro-American metropolises such as London, Paris or New York, this book considers the place of the colonial city in modernist fiction. From the streets of Dublin to the shop-houses of Singapore, and from the botanical gardens of Bombay to the suburbs of Suva, the monumental landscapes of British colonial cities aimed to reinforce empire's universalising claims, yet these spaces also contradicted a…
Ghosts of the plantation: Sugar, narrative energetics and gothic ecologies in Fiji
This article examines gothic representations of the sugarcane plantation in literature from Fiji. Focusing on Indo-Fijian texts, including Totaram Sanadhya’s ‘The Story of the Haunted Line’ (1922) and Subramani’s The Fantasy Eaters (1988), it shows how ghostly encounters and uncanny returns evoke not only the haunting memories of indenture but also the violent rushes and energy-depleting crashes generated by sugar. As a ‘vampire crop’, sugar is s…
Architectures of the invisible hand: Envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad's Singapore
In recent years, critical attention has shifted away from the subject of Conrad’s imperial politics and towards his representation of late nineteenth-century global capitalism, which extends panoramically from the business houses of London, Brussels and San Francisco to commodity frontiers as diverse as Malay tobacco plantations, African ivory lands and Latin American silver mines. This paper explores Conrad’s engagement with capitalism and its r…
A Swamp Becomes the Capital: Urban ecologies of empire in Suva (Fiji)
The nineteenth-century expansion of colonial port cities onto land reclaimed from the ocean generated both material and conceptual shifts in the relations between land and water. Focusing on the history of Suva, which was established as the British capital of Fiji in 1882, this article shows how, despite colonial accounts of successful efforts to 'drain the swamp', the city's history has been narrativised as a series of urban disasters. From loca…
Reading Commodities: An Introduction
If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of char…
Commodities and Literature
Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opiu…
The land has eyes and teeth: Copra plantations, gothic fertility, and literary genealogies in Oceania
This essay examines literary representations of the Pacific copra frontier. Comparing R.L. Stevenson’s gothic novella about a “tabooed” copra trader, “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), to Albert Wendt’s multigenerational novel about a “cursed” plantation owner in Samoa, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), it situates the texts’ shared gothic anxieties about paternity, fertility and genealogy within the context of the colonial plantation’s own threat to …
Archaeology (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Colonialism (5 works) · History (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Narrative (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)