Peter wakes up and realises that the time travel is a dream. Smith suggests we can understand the text to be a time travel comedy with a didactic message. It is a text situated somewhere between Dickens and Wells, taking parts from didacticism and science fiction #VPFAExtremes

To date, Sarah Alexander is the only scholar to pay any critical attention to this novel - so Smith's research is extremely original! #VPFAExtremes

read the short story here and let us know if you have any thoughts on it: www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/ten-...
#VPFAExtremes

Fowler says she finds walking a useful methodology because it allows her to situate herself in the landscape and understand why certain places were valued above others #VPFAExtremes

in a fascinating intersection of labour and colonial history, Ghandi visited Lancashire in 1931 to discuss the impact of the Indian boycott of British goods (particularly cotton) on the textile industry #VPFAExtremes

George Loveless was sent to modern day Tazmania for being a Tolpuddle martyr. He was concerned about the brutality of the colonial regime and wrote that it was a good warning about aristocracy possessing unfettered power in the colonies as they do back home #VPFAExtremes

1 example is Charborough Park, owned by MP Drax. His ancestor went to Barbados and built a sugar empire. The wealth from this & compensation for enslaving people affected locals. A toll road was built meaning local people suddenly had to pay to go in that direction #VPFAExtremes

Take a look at Fowler’s book ‘Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire’. She has an opium walk through the Lake District and more. It is a useful way of understanding what our colonial histories in this country are #VPFAExtremes

Edwardian spy fiction activated the idea of the chivalrous gentleman hero who is loyal to country, class, and kingdom. Ouida sets her spy fiction in the glamorous courtly world of high society and manipulates ideas of powerful men #VPFAExtremes

Ouida anticipates the trope of cosmopolitan clandestine networks. She believed that ‘to the true poet his native land lies wherever what is beautiful can be beloved, or that which is sorrowful needs solace’ #VPFAExtremes

Adventure fiction often features a hero ‘whose connection to his world is eccentric, who cannot or does not accept the strictures of that world [...] undergoes many improbable adventures, and finally abandons the exotic and reintegrates into the adult world’ #VPFAExtremes

her writing asserts the permeability of geographical borders and finds new ways of asserting multilingual and multicultural identities. The mountains, particularly, represent a place where the world convenes and how she understood her own multicultural identity #VPFAExtremes

Collier writes ‘that “other side of Italy” where we had made up our mind to settle [...] I should see Italian ways in all their unsullied primitiveness’. Collier's use of 'primitiveness' reflects not an opinion on class, but an interest in their connection to nature #VPFAExtremes

Situated against the backdrop of the pan European fear of degeneration, combined with growing xenophobia, the novel is a radical and extreme means of cleansing society of undesirable elements and people. The burning sickness is a ‘wonderfully discriminating plague’ #VPFAExtremes

the result of the plague is New England: 'A great number of the poorer classes had been swept away, and in this case of the survival of the fittest those left in England to rebuild London..' - definitely seems a bit classist #VPFAExtremes

Sporting Life wrote: ‘we have heard something of germs [...] but when plague germs sufficient to slay thousands upon thousands can be carried in the waistcoat pocket in a phial, and distributed at will, it might be time to seriously question the benefit of science' #VPFAExtremes