In 2023, Cambridge University Press published Coleridge and the Geometric Idiom - Walking with Euclid by Ann Colley. In the book, Colley outlines Coleridge’s alertness to the geometric idiom that helped shaped his responses to the landscape of his surroundings. In particular, Colley explains why Euclid’s Elements was such a basic text in Coleridge’s cultural context. To guide the reader, the introduction outlines the book’s argument, and, the chapter summaries provide an overview of the author's research for the book, conducted while in residence at Cambridge. Learn more about the book, here.
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The journal, Romanticism, offers a forum for the best critical and scholarly work in Romantic studies today. The journal focuses on the literary period of 1750-1850, publishing research on critical, historical, textual and bibliographical aspects, representing a full range of current methodological and theoretical debates. Volume 27.1 of the journal features work by Ann C. Colley: “Coleridge Walks: Boots and the Measure of the Landscape.” Romantic Walking. Romanticism is published by the Edinburgh University Press. Romanticism 27.1 (2021), 28-45 Read the work, here.
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Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain
Aldershot, England. Ashgate (now Routledge) Publishing. Ltd. 2014. What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborer all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomist and zoologists, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and portraying animal skins to show their importance as trophies of empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display skins to promote and glorify Britain’s colonial achievements, Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized more by curiosity and chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear’s commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s extensive collection challenge the colonial’s or collector’s commanding gaze, while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of skin as a locus of memory and touch were one’s past can be traced in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins. |
Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime.
Aldershot, England. Ashgate Publishing Limited. December, 2010. In Part One, Colley mines diaries and letters to interrogate how everyday tourists and climbers both responded to and undercut ideas about the sublime, showing how technological advances like the telescope transformed mountains into theatrical spaces where tourists thrilled to the sight of struggling climbers; almost inevitably, these distant performances were eventually reenacted at exhibitions and on the London stage. Colley’s examination of the Alpine Club archives, periodicals, and other primary resources offers a more complicated and inclusive picture of female mountaineering as she documents the strong presence of women on successful expeditions in the latter half of the century. In Part Two, Colley turns to John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose writings about the Alps reflect their feelings about their Romantic heritage and shed light on their ideas about perception, metaphor, and literary style. Colley concludes by offering insights into the ways in which expeditions to the Himalayas affected people’s sense of the sublime, arguing that these individuals were motivated as much by the glory of Empire as by aesthetic sensibility. Her book is an astute exploration of nationalism, as well as theories of gender, spectacle, and the technicalities of glacial movement that were intruding on what before had seemed inviolable. |
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination.
Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2004. In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas fiction, as well as into the particulars and complications of living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society and from other sources, such as the Royal Geographical Society (London), the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), and the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), Colley examines the intricate nature of Robert Louis Stevenson's relation to imperialism. In particular, she investigates Stevenson's complex relationship to the missionary culture that surrounded him during the last six years of his life (1888-1894), revealing hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's experiences while he was cruising among the South Sea islands, and later while he was a resident colonial in Samoa. Beginning with a history of the missionaries in the Pacific that reveals Stevenson's criticism of, yet ultimate support for, their work, and demonstrates how these attitudes helped shape his South Sea fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination constitutes a major work of reconstruction from archival sources. Subsequent chapters focus on Stevenson's struggles with personal and cultural identity in the South Seas, and his interest in photography, panoramas, and magic lantern shows, revealing Stevenson's sensitivity to the ways light plays upon darkness to create meaning. In addition, Stevenson's serious commitment to political issues and his thoughts about power and nationhood are explored. Finally, Stevenson's recollections of his childhood are engaged not only to suggest an unacknowledged source (the juvenile missionary magazines) for A Child's Garden of Verses, but also to illuminate the generous reach of his imagination that exceeds the formulae of the missionary culture and the boundaries of the colonial construct. |
Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture.
Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Press. Published by St. Martin's Press in the United States. 1998. This book is about a group of Victorian British writers and artists whose work emerges from recollection and whose texts embody the experience of nostalgia. In it discussion of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose and poetry, Elizabeth Gaskell’s narratives, John Ruskin’s Praeterita, Walter Pater’s “The Child in the House,” Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England, Richard Redgrave’s The Emigrants’ Last Sight of Home, and a series of J. M. W. Turner’s engravings, this study concentrates on the longing for a past that traverses the span of these writers’ and artists’ own lives. It examines their particular experience of the nostalgic moment; it also provides an occasion to re-examine the idea of nostalgia itself and to reflect on the act of recollection that accompanies it. |
Afterimages: a Festschrift in Honor of Irving Massey.
William Kumbier and Ann C. Colley. Shuffaloff, 1996. Available on Amazon. |
Edward Lear and the Critics. (Literary Criticism in Perspective)
Camden House, Inc. 1993. This book is a history of how criticism from the nineteenth century on has regarded Lear’s extensive work. |
The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art:
The Paradox of Space. The University of Georgia Press. 1990. In The Search for Synthesis in Literature and Art, Colley breaks new ground using metaphor to rethink the relation between verbal and visual images and, in a broader sense, to examine the desire for personal fusion in friendship and love. Drawing upon a wide range of artistic and literature figures, Colley emphasizes the paradox that synthesis is possible only when space remains between the elements that seek to blend. Contrary to what is often thought, she writes “the power of metaphor does not necessarily depend on its faculty to fuse the dissimilar. The figure’s potency also dwells within its structural gaps … The promise of synthesis is, paradoxically, available within those gaps.” To reveal the intrinsic structure of metaphor, Colley turns first to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. Lear’s limericks and drawings, in their tendency to link incongruous objects (carp/harp, hatchet/flea), remind the reader of the ever-present audible and visible space within metaphor. By contrast, the metamorphoses described in Ovid and Dante illustrate the deadly sterility of transformation that lacks the saving space of metaphor – a merging of words and images in which one form of expression entraps or misrepresents the other. Colley goes on to show how the dialogue between words and pictures becomes a shaping force in the work of Paul Klee; he fuses the two but also honors and sustains their difference. |
Tennyson & Madness.
The University of Georgia Press. 1983. The book describes Tennyson’s encounters with mental illness and examines the treatment of the theme of madness in his poetry. |
Starting with Poetry.
_________ with Judith K. Moore. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 1973. Available on Amazon. |