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Books by Vanessa Smith
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2023
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurren... more Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms.
Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
The mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most controversial events of eighteenth-century maritim... more The mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most controversial events of eighteenth-century maritime history. This book publishes a full and absorbing narrative of the events by one of the participants, the boatswain's mate James Morrison, who tells the story of the mounting tensions over the course of the voyage out to Tahiti, the fascinating encounter with Polynesian culture there, and the shocking drama of the event itself.
In the aftermath, Morrison was among those who tried to make a new life on Tahiti. In doing so, he gained a deeper understanding of Polynesian culture than any European who went on to write about the people of the island and their way of life before it was changed forever by Christianity and colonial contact. Morrison was not a professional scientist but a keen observer with a lively sympathy for Islanders. This is the most insightful and wide-ranging of early European accounts of Tahitian life.
Mutiny and Aftermath is the first scholarly edition of this classic of Pacific history and anthropology. It is based directly on a close study of Morrison’s original manuscript, one of the treasures of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia. The editors assess and explain Morrison’s observations of Islander culture and social relations, both on Tubuai in the Austral Islands and on Tahiti itself. The book fully identifies the Tahitian people and places that Morrison refers to and makes this remarkable text accessible for the first time to all those interested in an extraordinary chapter of early Pacific history.
When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which ‘Al... more When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was
struck by the way in which ‘All these people came crying out tayo,
which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all
asked nails and ear-rings of us.’ Reading the archive of early contact in
Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and
exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that
consistently led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe
that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her
book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the
Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook’s and Bligh’s voyages,
to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas.
It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of
friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly
British, explorations of Oceania.
This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined ... more This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined and theorised, both by island dwellers and continentals. This study considers how island dwellers conceived of themselves and their relation to proximate mainlands, and examines the fascination that islands have long held in the European imagination.
The collection addresses the significance of islands in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, the exploration of the Pacific, the important role played by islands in the process of decolonisation, and island-oriented developments in postcolonial writing.
Islands were often seen as natural colonies or settings for ideal communities but they were also used as dumping grounds for the unwanted, a practice which has continued into the twentieth century. The collection argues the need for an island-based theory within postcolonial studies and suggests how this might be constructed. Covering a historical span from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributors include literary and postcolonial critics, historians and geographers.
Papers by Vanessa Smith
Feminist Modernist Studies, 2017
ABSTRACT Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both d... more ABSTRACT Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplinarily and generically. Written before Milner trained as a psychoanalyst but delving into the Unconscious, and with a title that apparently alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the book marks a point of intersection between incipient psychoanalysis and Modernist writing, of the kind represented more explicitly in the Strachey and Stephen circles with which Milner was tenuously linked. Yet Milner’s insistence on the term “own” in her title and throughout the volume also makes this a useful text via which to explore the reflexes by which critics examine such crossings. This essay interrogates the critical impulse to figure intertextuality and discursive exchange as forms of debt. Turning to the manuscript source material of Milner’s book, it asks what might the concept of work of “one’s own” have to offer in terms of rethinking critical practice.
Times Literary Supplement Tls, 1993
Times Literary Supplement Tls, 1994
From the book Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters. The chapter focuse... more From the book Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters. The chapter focuses on the textual archive of the Bounty mutiny.
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2021
This essay takes some letters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels in the South Seas as a starti... more This essay takes some letters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels in the South Seas as a starting point to rethink both Stevenson’s South Seas oeuvre and the Victorian cross-cultural encounter. Reengaging with Marcel Mauss’s classic theorization of gift exchange, the essay suggests that Stevenson’s encounters with Oceanic systems of exchange were experienced in terms not of cultural dominance, but of ontological lack. The practices of gifting to which Stevenson found himself subject in the Mar- quesas, Tuamotus, and Tahiti rendered both British etiquette and largesse ineffectual. The essay relates Stevenson’s growing sense of the complexities of Oceanic gifting to the tendency of his metropolitan readers to understand his South Seas “exile” as a waste of his own gifts. Focusing in particular on The Wrecker (1892) and “The Bottle Imp” (1891), it proposes that Stevenson deployed his expanded understanding of what Oceanic gifting entailed to replenish his fiction in both structural and figurative terms, even as he was forced to acknowledge those failures of reciprocation that continued to inform its production.
PMLA, 2022
Nineteenth-century literature is littered with broken toys. From Maria Edgeworth's "disjointed do... more Nineteenth-century literature is littered with broken toys. From Maria Edgeworth's "disjointed dolls, maimed horses, coaches and one-horse chairs without wheels, and a nameless wreck of gilded lumber" (Edgeworth and Lovell 1), to the Brontë siblings' dismembered wooden soldiers, 1 to Maggie Tulliver's maltreated "Fetish," 2 they trip up readers, attesting to violent or distressed childish feeling that is not quite domesticated or socialized by the marriage plots and bildungsromans of the century's fictional corpus. Melanie Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. This essay turns to Charles Dickens's fiction to argue that nineteenthcentury representation gives formal inklings of both Klein's version of the child and her therapeutic insights. Focusing in particular on the dynamics of characterization, it traces a proto-Kleinian rhythm of aggression and reparation in an early and a "mature" Dickens text. Klein's work, which was highly contested by the Freudian psychoanalytic establishment both in her hometown of Vienna and in Berlin, where she first began practicing, was enthusiastically embraced when she came to England in 1926 and went on to provide the foundation for a distinct British school of object-relations psychoanalysis. 3 Dickens's novels, it has often been observed, feature a series of characters that seem suspended between childhood and adulthood. Rosemary Bodenheimer contends that "the Dickensian child does not grow up in the ordinary sense. Instead of developing, it changes places; it moves on" (13). Noting the difficulty of determining the age of Dickens's younger characters, she in particular references
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 2016
Feminist Modernist Studies, 2018
Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplina... more Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplinarily and generically. Written before Milner trained as a psychoanalyst but delving into the Unconscious, and with a title that apparently alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the book marks a point of intersection between incipient psychoanalysis and Modernist writing, of the kind represented more explicitly in the Strachey and Stephen circles with which Milner was tenuously linked. Yet Milner’s insistence on the term “own” in her title and throughout the volume also makes this a useful text via which to explore the reflexes by which critics examine such crossings. This essay interrogates the critical impulse to figure intertextuality and discursive exchange as forms of debt. Turning to the manuscript source material of Milner’s book, it asks what might the concept of work of “one’s own” have to offer in terms of rethinking critical practice.
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2023
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurren... more Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms.
Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
The mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most controversial events of eighteenth-century maritim... more The mutiny on the Bounty was one of the most controversial events of eighteenth-century maritime history. This book publishes a full and absorbing narrative of the events by one of the participants, the boatswain's mate James Morrison, who tells the story of the mounting tensions over the course of the voyage out to Tahiti, the fascinating encounter with Polynesian culture there, and the shocking drama of the event itself.
In the aftermath, Morrison was among those who tried to make a new life on Tahiti. In doing so, he gained a deeper understanding of Polynesian culture than any European who went on to write about the people of the island and their way of life before it was changed forever by Christianity and colonial contact. Morrison was not a professional scientist but a keen observer with a lively sympathy for Islanders. This is the most insightful and wide-ranging of early European accounts of Tahitian life.
Mutiny and Aftermath is the first scholarly edition of this classic of Pacific history and anthropology. It is based directly on a close study of Morrison’s original manuscript, one of the treasures of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, Australia. The editors assess and explain Morrison’s observations of Islander culture and social relations, both on Tubuai in the Austral Islands and on Tahiti itself. The book fully identifies the Tahitian people and places that Morrison refers to and makes this remarkable text accessible for the first time to all those interested in an extraordinary chapter of early Pacific history.
When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which ‘Al... more When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was
struck by the way in which ‘All these people came crying out tayo,
which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all
asked nails and ear-rings of us.’ Reading the archive of early contact in
Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and
exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that
consistently led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe
that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her
book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the
Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook’s and Bligh’s voyages,
to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas.
It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of
friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly
British, explorations of Oceania.
This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined ... more This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined and theorised, both by island dwellers and continentals. This study considers how island dwellers conceived of themselves and their relation to proximate mainlands, and examines the fascination that islands have long held in the European imagination.
The collection addresses the significance of islands in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, the exploration of the Pacific, the important role played by islands in the process of decolonisation, and island-oriented developments in postcolonial writing.
Islands were often seen as natural colonies or settings for ideal communities but they were also used as dumping grounds for the unwanted, a practice which has continued into the twentieth century. The collection argues the need for an island-based theory within postcolonial studies and suggests how this might be constructed. Covering a historical span from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributors include literary and postcolonial critics, historians and geographers.
Feminist Modernist Studies, 2017
ABSTRACT Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both d... more ABSTRACT Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplinarily and generically. Written before Milner trained as a psychoanalyst but delving into the Unconscious, and with a title that apparently alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the book marks a point of intersection between incipient psychoanalysis and Modernist writing, of the kind represented more explicitly in the Strachey and Stephen circles with which Milner was tenuously linked. Yet Milner’s insistence on the term “own” in her title and throughout the volume also makes this a useful text via which to explore the reflexes by which critics examine such crossings. This essay interrogates the critical impulse to figure intertextuality and discursive exchange as forms of debt. Turning to the manuscript source material of Milner’s book, it asks what might the concept of work of “one’s own” have to offer in terms of rethinking critical practice.
Times Literary Supplement Tls, 1993
Times Literary Supplement Tls, 1994
From the book Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters. The chapter focuse... more From the book Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters. The chapter focuses on the textual archive of the Bounty mutiny.
Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2021
This essay takes some letters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels in the South Seas as a starti... more This essay takes some letters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels in the South Seas as a starting point to rethink both Stevenson’s South Seas oeuvre and the Victorian cross-cultural encounter. Reengaging with Marcel Mauss’s classic theorization of gift exchange, the essay suggests that Stevenson’s encounters with Oceanic systems of exchange were experienced in terms not of cultural dominance, but of ontological lack. The practices of gifting to which Stevenson found himself subject in the Mar- quesas, Tuamotus, and Tahiti rendered both British etiquette and largesse ineffectual. The essay relates Stevenson’s growing sense of the complexities of Oceanic gifting to the tendency of his metropolitan readers to understand his South Seas “exile” as a waste of his own gifts. Focusing in particular on The Wrecker (1892) and “The Bottle Imp” (1891), it proposes that Stevenson deployed his expanded understanding of what Oceanic gifting entailed to replenish his fiction in both structural and figurative terms, even as he was forced to acknowledge those failures of reciprocation that continued to inform its production.
PMLA, 2022
Nineteenth-century literature is littered with broken toys. From Maria Edgeworth's "disjointed do... more Nineteenth-century literature is littered with broken toys. From Maria Edgeworth's "disjointed dolls, maimed horses, coaches and one-horse chairs without wheels, and a nameless wreck of gilded lumber" (Edgeworth and Lovell 1), to the Brontë siblings' dismembered wooden soldiers, 1 to Maggie Tulliver's maltreated "Fetish," 2 they trip up readers, attesting to violent or distressed childish feeling that is not quite domesticated or socialized by the marriage plots and bildungsromans of the century's fictional corpus. Melanie Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. This essay turns to Charles Dickens's fiction to argue that nineteenthcentury representation gives formal inklings of both Klein's version of the child and her therapeutic insights. Focusing in particular on the dynamics of characterization, it traces a proto-Kleinian rhythm of aggression and reparation in an early and a "mature" Dickens text. Klein's work, which was highly contested by the Freudian psychoanalytic establishment both in her hometown of Vienna and in Berlin, where she first began practicing, was enthusiastically embraced when she came to England in 1926 and went on to provide the foundation for a distinct British school of object-relations psychoanalysis. 3 Dickens's novels, it has often been observed, feature a series of characters that seem suspended between childhood and adulthood. Rosemary Bodenheimer contends that "the Dickensian child does not grow up in the ordinary sense. Instead of developing, it changes places; it moves on" (13). Noting the difficulty of determining the age of Dickens's younger characters, she in particular references
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 2016
Feminist Modernist Studies, 2018
Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplina... more Marion Milner’s 1934 A Life of One’s Own illustrates a modern woman’s “crossing,” both disciplinarily and generically. Written before Milner trained as a psychoanalyst but delving into the Unconscious, and with a title that apparently alludes to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the book marks a point of intersection between incipient psychoanalysis and Modernist writing, of the kind represented more explicitly in the Strachey and Stephen circles with which Milner was tenuously linked. Yet Milner’s insistence on the term “own” in her title and throughout the volume also makes this a useful text via which to explore the reflexes by which critics examine such crossings. This essay interrogates the critical impulse to figure intertextuality and discursive exchange as forms of debt. Turning to the manuscript source material of Milner’s book, it asks what might the concept of work of “one’s own” have to offer in terms of rethinking critical practice.
“Toy Stories” takes Maggie Tulliver's “grinding and beating” of her broken doll in The Mill on th... more “Toy Stories” takes Maggie Tulliver's “grinding and beating” of her broken doll in The Mill on the Floss as a starting point for thinking about manifestations of childish distress, rage, and shame in the nineteenth-century novel. Using Melanie Klein's play theories, it argues that the child's toy is the archetypal object of the “prosaic imaginary,” at once material and symbolic, internal and external, partial and whole, destructive and therapeutic; an everyday object that is not simply typical high realist ballast but also the stuff of dreams. The essay suggests that the nineteenth-century development of educational theory was shadowed by a prescient fictional vision of childish destructiveness emblematized in the broken toy, and it asks what this might mean in particular for the bildungsroman and its educative telos. Franco Moretti has claimed that the European bildungsroman depends on the hero's breaking with, rather than remaining faithful to, youthful impressions. Startlingly actualized toy stories, however, risk keeping the narrative childish, backward glancing, even as they look forward to an impending modernity and the language of object-relations psychoanalysis. The essay sketches the “toy story” as an alternative narrative working within and against the imperatives of the bildungsroman: “grinding and beating” at its certainties; forgetting and losing its plots.
This chapter looks at English-language novels in Oceania. The Anglophone novel's location ‘in Oce... more This chapter looks at English-language novels in Oceania. The Anglophone novel's location ‘in Oceania’ pre-1950 is largely imaginary. Many of the authors of both canonical and popular works set in the Pacfic islands never visited the region, and none was born there. Thus, the chapter is concerned with the dialectical relationship between fantasy and contact evidenced in novels set in Oceania before 1950, a location dreamed up before it was mapped, and whose romanticized or dystopian premonitions continued to shadow its representation even after Anglophone writers began to send dispatches from its beaches. The novel speaks inevitably, with or more often without political self-consciousness, to the gap between imagined and real Oceanias—and so, to the relationship between fiction and history.
Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World ed, Ofer Gal and Yi Zheng, 2014
Taking the animadversions of Samuel Johnson as its starting point, this essay explores an eightee... more Taking the animadversions of Samuel Johnson as its starting point, this essay explores an eighteenth-century skepticism regarding the possibility of exchanges of knowledge between metropolitan and peripheral societies. It suggests that encounters with Inuit and Oceanic traveller-savants in the streets and salons of London lead both members of the Royal Society and patrons of the arts to question the translatability of ideas across cultural boundaries, and to articulate a distinction between ethnographic and practical knowledge. It argues that this meta-critical dimension to the dialogues between Europeans and visitors from the peripheries of Empire ultimately constituted one of the most nuanced intellectual exchanges instigated by Enlightenment travel.
