Rebecka Klette | Birkbeck College, University of London (original) (raw)

Books by Rebecka Klette

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018

How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple form... more How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.

Published articles by Rebecka Klette

Conference Presentations by Rebecka Klette

During the late nineteenth-century, degeneration emerged as the spectre haunting European evoluti... more During the late nineteenth-century, degeneration emerged as the spectre haunting European evolutionary discourse, reaching as far as Scandinavia: Swedish racial biologist Herman Lundborg argued that the 'inner enemy' was to be found in the degeneration-defined as 'hereditary inferiority causing racial deterioration'-of the Swedish race (Lundborg 1922). While British and continental degeneration theory has been thoroughly explicated during the past years, little scholarly attention has been given to the influences and transnational exchanges of degenerationist thought between Scandinavia, Britain, and the continent during the late nineteenth-and early twentieth century. This paper aims to contribute to degeneration studies by illuminating lesser known works on degeneration, tracing how degenerationist rhetoric and knowledge was disseminated into Scandinavian academia, literary circles and cultural debate. My source material will primarily concern works by Scandinavian scientists Salomon Henschen, Gustav Retzius, Herman Lundborg, Halfdan Bryn and Ragnar Vogt, as well as contemporary Scandinavian responses to various international works on degeneration, such as those by Nordau, Spencer, and Lombroso. My paper aspires to broaden the geographical scope of degeneration studies by juxtaposing the notion of late nineteenth-century British degenerationist thought as a closed system of knowledge with a wider, more inclusive network of mutual contributions between European scientists. Furthermore, I will stress the importance of degeneration theory to Scandinavian racial sciences, fuelling eugenic efforts to regenerate the vigour of the Nordic race, culminating in the founding of the Swedish National Institute of Eugenics in 1922, with Herman Lundborg as director.

In Punch's satirical portrayals of 'the Woman Question' during the late nineteenth and early twen... more In Punch's satirical portrayals of 'the Woman Question' during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tropes from Greek mythology were widely utilised both to idealise and defame. In this paper, I will elucidate how the iconography of the Maenad-alongside the Siren, Gorgon, Harpy and Amazon-was appropriated by political cartoonists to vocalise anxieties regarding female suffrage, degeneration, and the subversive New Woman. I will interpret late Victorian and Edwardian pictorial and literary uses of the Maenad in correlation with Johannes Fabian's assertion that 'anthropology often involves the assumption that the other exists in a different time'. Fabian 1 has famously argued that anthropology is inherently allochronic, always placing the observed Other in a different Time than the observer. Fabian interprets terms such as 'primitive', 'savage', 'barbaric', 'modern', 'archaic' and 'civilised' to be temporal categories: from this, I will infer 'atavistic' to be a temporal concept, wherein the modern Maenad could be contained and neutralised. My aim is to outline how political cartoons were used as temporal and evolutionary distancing devices, consistently banishing the female Other-portrayed as primitive, criminal, and violent-to a different, earlier Time and stage of evolutionary development than the male observer. The mid-Victorian concept of Deep Time thus fused mythological Time and historical Time, allowing the mythical beasts of a distant, savage past to enter the modern, civilised present. A common Gothic trope here emerges: for much like other Gothicized monsters, such as Dracula, Olalla, the Beetle, or Mr Hyde, the Modern Maenad is presented as simultaneous present and past, an atavistic throwback to an early stage of history or evolution, a temporally dislocated being present in a time in which she does not belong. Moreover, the Gothic aspect is visible in the depiction of the Maenad as vampiric, bloodthirsty, and sexually deviant. The intrusive temporalities of the Wild Woman, the New Woman, and the Suffragette are addressed when they are referred to as 'The Modern Maenad', becoming the horrifying past a British femininity in decline could degenerate to. However, by associating subversive women with maenadism, they were temporally contained in the past, in another Time, never a threat to the present or future state of womanhood. This paper suggests that the Gothicized mythological narrative of maenadism was used to undermine the political aspirations of the New Woman and the suffragette movement, achieved by framing female progress and calls for suffrage as threatening temporal and evolutionary mobility, emblematic of an ancient, primitive and atavistic Time of the Other.

The nineteenth century has often been described as the age of taxonomy: the need to classify and ... more The nineteenth century has often been described as the age of taxonomy: the need to classify and characterise manifested itself through the construction and consumption of racial stereotypes, national characters, and detailed gender roles alike. In this paper, I will move beyond imagology-the study of national stereotypes and notions of national character-to the study of temporal stereotypes, signifying and embodying a specific period, century, or zeitgeist. More specifically, I will employ representations of embodied Time in late nineteenth-century cartoons, comparing the British political cartoons found in Punch with their European counterparts. This will enable me to elucidate how the Victorians conceived and consumed their own century and temporality, and what visual markers, in semiotical terms, were associated with the temporal physiognomy of the fin-de-siècle. By utilising Johannes Fabian's notion of 'the denial of coevalness', or the anthropological tendency to position the Other in a different time than the observer, I will interpret categories such as 'modern', 'civilised', 'degenerate' and 'atavistic' as temporal concepts, constructed through the naturalisation of Time into what Fabian labels 'evolutionary Time' (Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983, 2014), pp 17-18, 30). I will argue that figures such as the decadent and effeminate Aesthete, the mannish New Woman, and the subversive Suffragette were not only portrayed as products of their time, but as temporally Other, as belonging to a time plagued by deviant modernity. This confined the temporal stereotypes to a different time than the Victorian observers, juxtaposing the idea of linear cultural progress with that of evolution with a negative telos, sexual deviance, and degeneration.

One-Day Conference: Defining and defying the concepts of deviance and degeneration in the British... more One-Day Conference: Defining and defying the concepts of deviance and degeneration in the British Isles and North America in the 19th century
January 14th 2016 in the Université Lyon 2/ENS campus in Lyons, France.

BSHS Postgraduate Conference 2016, Cambridge University

Papers by Rebecka Klette

Studies in Travel Writing, 2019

‘I love acting, it is so much more real than life’. Lord Henry Wotton, in his statement in Wilde’... more ‘I love acting, it is so much more real than life’. Lord Henry Wotton, in his statement in Wilde’s classic novel, appears to be anticipating Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, in which representation becomes more real than the represented object. In my paper, I will outline how the protagonists in The Picture of Dorian Gray and A Rebours rejected Nature and urban society in favour of their own constructed artificial environments within, or just outside of, the urban city-space. I aver that Dorian and Des Esseintes were trying to escape nature by creating fake nature, in Des Esseintes’ case by surrounding himself with artifice, and in Dorian’s case by actually replacing himself with Art. Perceiving the industrial city as alienating, the aesthete wanted to escape to nature, but an imagined nature, a refined and processed nature. I will argue that these artificial environments should be conceived of as simulacra, as the sign that has replaced the signified, rendering the outside world irrelevant, and the artificial milieu hyperreal. My contribution to the existing body of knowledge will thus concern representations and constructions of artificial environments, which began to precede the actual city environment as well as nature, becoming representations of a reality which did not exist, engendering hyperreal spaces.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018

BSHS Postgraduate Conference 2016, Cambridge University

Studies in Travel Writing, 2019

My contribution to the body of knowledge consists of a delineation of representations of the Ge... more My contribution to the body of knowledge consists of a delineation of representations of the German as temporally and spatially Other, as different in Time and Space, in literature, travel writing, and political cartoons, 1870-1914. I utilise the frameworks of imagology, semiotics, and the theory of temporalisation outlined by Johannes Fabian, in order to show how these literary and visual representations constructed the stereotypical German national character as existing in a different, more primitive Time than the civilised English. Additionally, I map how this projected national stereotype became, to use the terminology of Jean Baudrillard, hyperreal, i.e. perceived to be more real than the German individuals who supposedly possessed the imagined national character. This development was, I argue, achieved through the production and dissemination of national stereotypes through different mediums of late nineteenth and early twentieth century print media. The different modes of representations, I argue, were used as temporalising devices in order to encapsulate and contain the German in the Past, in a different Time. Before the German unification in 1871, Germany had been perceived as a backward, yet admirable culture, economically, politically, and colonially lagging behind Britain. However, the unified nation state’s subsequent economical and industrial prosperity, as well as its naval and colonial expansion, enabled Germany to emerge as a political rival to Britain, alternating between the role of ally and a viable threat. In order to neutralise such a threat, the perceived German national characteristics of efficiency and organisation, subservience to authority, and excessive militarism, were interpreted as symptoms of temporal distantiation. To the British observer, the German was no longer confined to a different Time, constantly lagging behind the Time of the English, but had reached and intruded into the present, posing a temporal invasion.