Susann Liebich | Universität Heidelberg (original) (raw)

Books by Susann Liebich

The thesis is a study of reading practices and communities across various sites of the British Em... more The thesis is a study of reading practices and communities across various sites of the British Empire between 1890-1930, a period marked by near universal literacy levels and affordable, mass print production. It draws on the extensive archive of Fred Barkas (1854-1932), an English-born New Zealand resident, whose reading and writing has left a uniquely rich record of reading practices over a forty-year period, and the records of other individual and group readers in Canada, Britain and Australia. As a social history of reading, the study explores how reading shaped personal relationships, fashioned individual and collective identities, and contributed to the processes of community formation, locally and across space. The remarkable depth of Barkas&#39;s records allows an examination of how a reader situated in a provincial centre on the outskirts of empire could be at the &quot;centre&quot; of a British reading world. Barkas&#39;s records are supplemented by library records, by the minute books and scrapbooks of the Canadian reader Margaret McMicking (1849-1944) and the Victoria Literary Society, B.C., and by the publications of the National and the Australasian Home Reading Union, active in the British Empire between 1889 and 1930. Like Barkas, McMicking and members of the Home Reading movement participated in a social world of reading that was simultaneously defined by local specifics and by imperial connections. The study considers reading within a variety of spaces, times and social environments. The discussion leads from an exploration of local reading networks in Timaru which connected in a number of spaces, to a particular place of reading: the Timaru Public Library. Reading, and writing about reading, was central to Fred Barkas‘s relationship with his daughter Mary. Mary lived in England for most of her adult life from 1913; the lengthy and detailed correspondence between Fred and Mary provides a basis for the exploration of reading in a family intimacy spanning space and time. Group reading cultures are discussed through Barkas&#39;s involvement with several reading and discussion groups in Timaru, and McMicking&#39;s membership in the Victoria Literary Society in British Columbia. These local reading groups were embedded in existing associational cultures and constituted important spaces for sociability within prevailing notions about class and gender. The empire-wide Home Reading movement addressed concerns about the right kind of reading, stressing in particular the importance of reading in circles. The Union extended the debate about reading to notions of citizenship of nation and empire, a responsibility especially emphasized during World War One. During the war, civilians in different sites across the empire used their reading for information as well as escape, and reading turned into a mechanism to cope with heightened anxiety. A diversity of reading practices is evident across these spaces and included reading that was variously entertaining, recreational, productive, instructive, informative, social and solitary. Connections to other readers influenced the choice of reading material and reading practice. Reading alone and silently, reading out loud at group meetings or with friends, taking notes, reflecting on reading in writing, re-reading texts, and discussing one&#39;s reading in writing or talk with others all contributed to reading cultures that were highly social. The thesis argues that in order to understand the place of reading in specific localities and in the wider British Empire in this period, we need to train our gaze simultaneously on the local and on the imperial, and move beneath and beyond national histories of reading. The readers in this study connected to places outside their local communities, and to a larger reading world not only through what they read but how they read. Recent scholarship on the new imperialism has emphasized the notion of the British Empire as a &quot;web&quot; – a set of networks facilitating the flow of people, goods and ideas across the empire. Print and other forms of the written word formed an important part of this movement and exchange. Reading material and suggestions for reading flowed back and forth, books were bought and shipped as commercial goods, were sent as gifts in private mail, or lent to other readers within existing networks. Across the lines of connections, discussion about reading flowed profusely in newspapers, journals, NHRU magazines and letters. This study offers insights into the ways in which reading and reading practices operated across the webs of empire.

In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation open... more In the early twentieth century, new technologies of media, communication, and transportation opened up a world of possibilities and led to transformations of the public sphere. Amongst the hundreds of new periodicals flooding the Australian marketplace, quality culture and leisure magazines beckoned to readers with the glamour of modernity and exotic images of pre-modern paradise. Through instructive and entertaining content, these glossy modern magazines widened the horizons of non-metropolitan audiences and connected readers in rapidly urbanising cities such as Sydney and Melbourne with the latest fashions, current affairs, and cultural offerings of London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. Designed by fashionable commercial artists, travel advertisements for shipping companies such as Burns Philp, Cunard, Matson, and P&O lined their pages. The golden age of the culture and leisure magazine coincided with the golden age of sea travel, middlebrow aspiration, and modernity. Focusing on the Australian interwar periodicals The Home, The BP Magazine, and MAN, this book explores the contraction of vast geographical spaces and the construction of cultural hierarchies alongside the advent of new media. This book investigates the role tastemaking culture and leisure magazines played in transporting the public imagination outward beyond the shores of Australia and upward or downward on the rapidly changing scales of cultural value. By delivering a potent mix of informative instruction, entertainment, worldliness, and escape, these magazines constructed distinct geographical imaginaries connected to notions of glamour, sophistication, and aspiration. They guided their readers through the currents of international modernity and helped them find their place in the modern world. The Transported Imagination Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity This book is based on thorough research into an archive of important yet under-examined modern Australian periodicals, and makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on magazines and middlebrow culture in the interwar period. It offers new insights into the formation of the tastes of a rapidly modernising and differentiating reading public, as well as new understandings of the cultures of vernacular modernity and colonialism. This book also offers alternative perspectives, and positions Australia's cultural and literary history within transnational cultural flows across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its analysis of Australian colonial modernity thus provides a model for examining collisions of modernity and colonialism, and for investigating connections between geographical imaginaries and social mobility, in other international contexts. The Transported Imagination will appeal to a wide range of scholars. Primary audiences are scholars of Australian cultural and literary history; and scholars of print culture, reading history, the middlebrow, mobility studies, media history, and colonial modernity in other national or local milieus. Written in a fluid, reader-friendly style, this book will also appeal to the general reader, and is of special relevance to a range of university courses and students whose research focuses on print culture, periodical studies, or travel in the context of modernism and modernity.

Papers by Susann Liebich

Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea, 2021

During World War I, over one hundred troopships carried nearly one hundred thousand New Zealand s... more During World War I, over one hundred troopships carried nearly one hundred thousand New Zealand soldiers to battlefields in Europe and the Middle East. Crowded and confined, and characterised by regulation and a lack of privacy, these were the spaces where men negotiated their transition from civilian to soldier. This essay focuses on the magazines produced and circulated during and subsequent to the voyages. These documents provided distraction, entertainment, and an outlet for creativity; chronicled—and later served as mementoes of—the journey; offered a sanctioned opportunity to challenge authority; helped bind the men into a community that would outlast the voyage; and, when sent home to friends and family, communicated the men’s experiences to those beyond the ship. In the content and the materiality of such magazines, this essay argues, the space of the ocean and of the troopship are acutely present, as is the wider context of war.

Shipboard Literary Practices: Reading, Writing and Performing at Sea, 2021

The introduction to the edited volume outlines the topics covered by the essays that follow and p... more The introduction to the edited volume outlines the topics covered by the essays that follow and places them within historical and academic contexts. Turning for examples to several literary and non-literary texts, most notably the 1820s diaries of Edward Beck and Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), it considers the differences and the continuities that prevail in shipboard environments across time, while also discussing the ways in which the human experience of time itself is complicated by seafaring. Particular attention is paid to the role of literary practices in shaping the experience of seafaring—to how such practices construct and reshape shipboard hierarchies, and also to how they help seafarers come to terms with the shipboard environment and with the ocean itself. While thus shaping shipboard cultures, the introduction argues, literary practices are also themselves affected—or ‘stained’—by the ocean environment.

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2015

I Contexts and concepts Recently, modernist and early twentieth-century scholarship has opened up... more I Contexts and concepts Recently, modernist and early twentieth-century scholarship has opened up to two new currents: one is the study of the middlebrow and popular cultures (broadening the scope of artifacts to be considered) and the second is the study of non-metropolitan modernisms (broadening the range of places or local traditions to be included). Opening up the field of modernist studies to this material has stimulated discussions about the construction and contestation of cultural value and has drawn some new attention to the role of geography. Somewhat different discussions of the construction and contestation of cultural value have been central to postcolonial studies. Yet this field, too, has broadened its methods and scope beyond theoretically driven analyses of a small coterie of literary texts to encompass a wider range of cultural material. In work that considers the relation of texts to other artifacts and to cultural and commercial domains broadly inflected by colonialism, there is renewed attention to the archive and to the role of history.1 The interwar representation of the

Transfers, 2017

In the interwar period, increasingly mobile Australians began to contemplate travel across the Pa... more In the interwar period, increasingly mobile Australians began to contemplate travel across the Pacific, both toward Asia as well as to America. Contemporary writing reflected this highly mobile culture and Pacific gaze, yet literary histories have overlooked this aspect of cultural history. Instead of looking to Australian novels as indexes of culture, as literary studies often do, this article explores the range of writing and print culture in magazines, concentrating on notions of mobility through the Pacific. Its focus is on the quality magazines MAN and The Home, which addressed two distinct, gendered readerships, but operated within similar cultural segments. This article suggests that the distinct geographical imaginaries of these magazines, which linked travel and geographical mobility with aspiration and social mobility, played a role in consolidating and nourishing the class standing of their readers, and revealed some of their attitudes toward gender and race.

This exhibition explored the cultural lives of soldiers, a topic that permeated every aspect of s... more This exhibition explored the cultural lives of soldiers, a topic that permeated every aspect of soldiers' experiences of the First World War but that is rarely commemorated. The exhibition revealed that a wide range of cultural activities were undertaken by soldiers including reading, writing (both personal and for publication), musical performances, craft, and experiences of travel. Kind assistance from the family of Astley James Bromfield allowed the exhibition to include items from the family's collection and to explore a North Queensland soldier's experiences of the War. The exhibition drew on significant original research conducted using the resources of Special Collections at the James Cook University Library. It presented items held by that library, items from the 4RAA Museum Collection, and material generously loaned by the family of Astley James Bromfield.

The Library, Feb 23, 2019

n their 2006 overview chapter on 'Libraries in the Modern World', Alistair Black and Peter Hoare ... more n their 2006 overview chapter on 'Libraries in the Modern World', Alistair Black and Peter Hoare argue convincingly for the significant role that libraries, in a range of organizational forms, have played in shaping 'modern' society, as places that provide an anchorage in an ever changing world, which order knowledge and offer opportunities for spiritual refuge. Black and Hoare take special note of the 'hidden libraries', as they term them, that we still know relatively little about and which were and are part of a broader culture of providing access to print to a range of readers: in hotels and holiday camps, in restaurants and coffee houses, in prisoners-of-war camps and army installations, as well as the many libraries 'in connec tion with various types of modern transport'. 1 Indeed, if libraries are a crucial aspect of society in the 'modern' world, so is mobility. 2 This article considers libraries on the move, focusing on the interrelationship between libraries and sea travel, the dominant form of global transport for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Millions of travellers embarked on the large steamers of modern shipping companies, whether travel ling for leisure, business or migration. While travel diaries and fictional representa tions of sea travel are replete with references to people spending time on ships reading, what texts were part of sea travel and how travellers accessed books and other reading matter often remains elusive. Drawing on a number of extant catalogues of ships' libraries on passenger steamers operating in the Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article considers the provision and usage of ships' libraries and the ways in which these formed part of the experiences of travel.

1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2020

Newspapers were crucial in bringing news of the First World War to readers in New Zealand and rea... more Newspapers were crucial in bringing news of the First World War to readers in New Zealand and readers avidly consumed the papers, often in freely accessible library reading rooms. The majority of the country's mainstream papers serving local, regional, and national readerships supported New Zealand's war effort and offered little criticism of the government, adhering to increasingly complex censorship regulations. However, smaller papers, with working-class, pacifist, and socialist leanings, offered strong voices of dissent.

The Library, 2019

Reading has always been part of travel, whether by rail, road or ship. This article focusses on t... more Reading has always been part of travel, whether by rail, road or ship. This article focusses on the interrelationship between libraries and sea travel, the dominant form of global transport for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While travel diaries and fictional accounts of sea travel are replete with references to shipboard reading, they reveal little about what texts passengers consumed or how they accessed reading material. Drawing on a number of extant catalogues and records of ships’ libraries on passenger steamers operating in the Pacific as well as on travellers’ accounts, this article considers the provisions and usage of ships’ libraries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The catalogues reveal that these libraries on the move provided predominantly topical, bestselling and entertaining fiction, catering to (perceived) demands for distraction and short-term reading pleasure.

New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives, 2018

The January 1923 issue of the New Zealand magazine the Ladies' Mirror enticed its readers with a ... more The January 1923 issue of the New Zealand magazine the Ladies' Mirror enticed its readers with a cover depicting a young woman and man clad in swimming attire, standing on a beach and glancing at each other, while two other young women, also in swimsuits, look on (see .1). This image of beaches as spaces for youthful recreation and leisure, and suggestive of the romance of the sea, was complemented by other content in the magazine that emphasised the joys of seaside holidays; gave advice on beach fashion and on how to prevent damage to skin and hair when swimming in the ocean; visualised the beauty of coasts in photo series; and advertised seaside sections and 'smart, inexpensive bathing costumes and caps' to readers and potential consumers. 1 The editorial reflected that the essence of summer holidays was an absolute change to 'the usual habits of life and in outlook and environment', and what better place for city dwellers to spend a summer holiday than at the beach and near the sea? Especially, it suggested, since the desire to be close to the ocean was something that ran in the blood of New Zealanders:

Topmasts: The Quarterly Newsletter of The Society for Nautical Research, 2017

This short essay, which develops the paper we gave on the 'New Disciplinary Horizons' panel at th... more This short essay, which develops the paper we gave on the 'New Disciplinary Horizons' panel at the State of Maritime Research conference in Greenwich, outlines some of the ways in which maritime studies might be brought into dialogue with certain areas of literary studies and cultural history, before offering some more general thoughts on the future of the discipline. The first claim we wish to make is that maritime historians often undervalue, as a resource, voyage diaries and other forms of private writing by passengers and crew. The relative neglect of such documents reflects the tendency in maritime and naval history to focus on technological, economic or political aspects of shipping, or on the biographies of great seafarers and naval captains. It can also be explained by the practicalities of historical research and the nature of diaries as historical sources. Held at diverse and dispersed locations, from major research libraries such as the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum (which holds hundreds of diaries) to regional records offices (which may hold only one or two), these documents are often written in difficult hands and frequently remain untranscribed. Where transcripts are available, they are usually written out on a typewriter but often not digitized, and thus unsearchable through keyword searches. If a researcher in maritime studies is looking for relatively 'raw' data (on numbers or names of passengers, for example, or on specifics of routes or of cargo), voyage diaries are not of great assistance: as sources of such data they are unwieldy, offering limited information that is relatively unreliable and difficult to track down, at least when compared with other documents such as passenger lists, port books, and ships' logs. But voyage diaries also offer something that other sources do not, or at least not to the same extent: a rich and detailed account of life at sea. Other forms of written text may tell us that a ship travelling from Liverpool to Adelaide in 1892 had 14 pigs on board, but a voyage diary can help us think more carefully about what is was like to share a small wooden world with farm animals that were as out of their element as was, in many cases, the diarists themselves. Other documents may tell us how many passengers on a certain vessel travelled in first or cabin class and how many in steerage, but a voyage diary can provide first-hand evidence as to how these proportions affected shipboard dynamics, or how passengers of different class affiliations thought of and related to one another. Other documents – most obviously the many surviving menus – can tell us what was eaten and drunk on passenger vessels, but voyage diaries can tell us how drunk passengers got and what were the consequences of this inebriation. They can also hint at what mealtimes meant to a passenger divorced from their usual daily routines. In addition, diaries often elaborate on scandalous

This special section considers the interconnections of print culture and mobility across the Paci... more This special section considers the interconnections of print culture and mobility across the Pacific in the early twentieth century. The contributors explore how print culture was part of the practices, experiences, mediations, and representations of travel and mobility, and understand mobility in a number of ways: from the movement of people and texts across space and the mobility of ideas to the opportunities of social mobility through travel. The special section moves beyond studies of travel writing and the literary analysis of travel narratives by discussing a range of genres, by paying attention to readers and reception, and by focusing on actual mobility and its representation as well as the mediation between the two.

Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies, 2017

In the interwar period, the Pacific Ocean was crisscrossed by hundreds of passenger liners, and i... more In the interwar period, the Pacific Ocean was crisscrossed by hundreds of passenger liners, and island themes and settings splashed across the silver screen and the pages of glossy magazines. New technology produced new touristic engagements with the region that reproduced the age old themes of colonial adventure but in nuanced ways that were sensitive to rapidly changing cultural values as the new media of film and photography reached critical saturation. This article considers the way that magazines, as inherently intermedial forms, were hinge platforms that showcased and facilitated a number of differently mediated encounters with this rapidly modernizing frontier, the last ocean to open up to mass transportation. Changing media values and familiarity with the region in late colonial modernity, we argue, were different on each side of the ocean, as were the cultural associations and levels of familiarity with the region and Hollywood. In this article we consider the space and place of the Pacific in two different magazines published across the Pacific basin in late colonial modernity: America's Sunset(1898-) and Australia's The BP Magazine.

Australian Historical Studies 46: 2 (2015), 320-322

First World War Studies, 2015

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, the National Home Reading Union, a British educat... more Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, the National Home Reading Union, a British educational organisation concerned with guiding working-class and middle-class readers in their reading practices and choices, issued a pamphlet with advice on reading in wartime. An enthusiastic appeal to readers in Britain and to members of the Union to keep up their reading and study as they had done before the outbreak of the war, the address also stressed that the right kind of reading was now, in times of conflict, more important than ever before. This article considers the ways in which the NHRU redefined the everyday practice of reading as a crucial part of the war effort during the First World War. By drawing on the Union’s magazines and other publicity material, this article explores the changing meanings of reading during the First World War, paying attention to the larger discourse about reading, what constituted the right kind of reading, both in terms of practices and content, and how reading could be constructed as a productive activity that constituted active expressions of patriotism and citizenship.

The cultural responses to the First World War and the importance of the printed word in times of conflict have received sustained scholarly attention, and current reappraisals of the cultural history of the First World War in light of its centenary have already contributed to a renewed interest in the war’s intellectual history. Much of that scholarly attention has focussed on the ways in which the war acted as a prompt to writing and print considering the literary responses to the First World War, the production of texts during and after the conflict, and the role of writing for expressions of patriotism or dissent. Some scholars have begun to interrogate the reception of print and the reading practices of civilians and soldiers, highlighting that the war made reading more urgent and brought into sharper focus the need for reading for a variety of purposes. Readers read for relief, distraction and escape, and they also read for information, education, and to gain a sense of understanding of the world around them. Reading constituted an important mechanism for coming to terms with and living through a world at war, and readers in Britain and elsewhere in the British world participated in the war by knowing about it.

This article extends current understandings of wartime reading and argues that through organisations like the NHRU the reading practices of civilians formed part of the war effort. Much of the NHRU’s message during its forty-year existence concerned the effect of reading as steadying minds, increasing mental capacities and thus exercising a general, civilising influence. This rhetoric about the broader societal value of reading – everyday, general reading of fiction and non-fiction, though of the right kind – was emphasised during the war as especially important and urgent. Crucially, the NHRU framed reading as an act of duty and service. Placing the work of the NHRU within the broader scholarship on patriotic organisations and the war work of civilians, this article argues that the NHRU extended the concept of good citizenship to the practices of reading.