Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Grainne Goodwin
Course Director
Grainne's research focuses on the intersections between colonial encounters (specifically in British India), cultural production and gendered experience in the late-19th century. Her work on critical late-Victorian figures engages with current debates on the relationship between colony and metrople and on colonial networking. Although historically grounded, Grainne's research is interdisciplinary in approach, utilising and contextualising colonial journalism, novels, business correspondence and print ephemera. This interdisciplinarity is reflected in her most recent project, which uses book history and histories of travel and tourism to analyse Victorian guidebooks and their publishing processes.
Grainne also edits the Social History Blog - the online resource of the journal Social History - and tweets at @SocHistBlog.
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About
Grainne's research focuses on the intersections between colonial encounters (specifically in British India), cultural production and gendered experience in the late-19th century. Her work on critical late-Victorian figures engages with current debates on the relationship between colony and metrople and on colonial networking. Although historically grounded, Grainne's research is interdisciplinary in approach, utilising and contextualising colonial journalism, novels, business correspondence and print ephemera. This interdisciplinarity is reflected in her most recent project, which uses book history and histories of travel and tourism to analyse Victorian guidebooks and their publishing processes.
Grainne also edits the Social History Blog - the online resource of the journal Social History - and tweets at @SocHistBlog.
Dr Gráinne Goodwin is Senior Lecturer in History and course leader for the MA Social History. Her research focuses on the intersections between colonial encounters (specifically in British India), cultural production and gendered experience in the late-nineteenth century.
Gráinne's work has centred on critical late-Victorian figures such as the memsahib and novelist Flora Annie Steel and the social reformer Behramji Malabari, both of whom made important interventions on gendered notions of colonial modernity during the British Raj. Her work on these figures engages with current debates within new imperial history on the relationship between colony and metrople and on colonial networking. Although historically grounded, Gráinne's research is interdisciplinary in approach, utilising and contextualising colonial journalism, novels, business correspondence and print ephemera. This interdisciplinarity is reflected in her most recent project, which uses book history and histories of travel and tourism to analyse Victorian guidebooks and their publishing processes.
Gráinne also edits the Social History Blog - the online resource of the journal Social History - and tweets at @SocHistBlog
Related links
Research interests
Gráinne's current research project explores the pioneering Murray's Handbooks for Travellers series; the nineteenth-century forerunner of today's travel guides.
Drawing on the world class Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland (NLS) she is investigating the evolution of the Victorian guidebook and has delivered a public lecture on the Murray Handbook series at the NLS, Edinburgh. Her research approaches the handbooks as key texts of modernity. Her work locates these texts of travel and tourism alongside fundamental publishing, literary and socio-cultural developments in nineteenth-century British, European and imperial history. She is working on a book project about these guidebooks with Dr Gordon Johnston entitled Travel Guides and the Modern World: John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, to be published with Manchester University Press.
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Publications (9)
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Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century: John Murray's Handbook for Travellers
December 2012
Studies in Travel Writing17(1):43-61 Taylor & Francis
Goodwin G, Johnston GJohn Murray pioneered the modern travel guidebook. This article draws on quantitative and qualitative sources from the Murray archive and Victorian print media to examine the commercial and critical fortunes of the world's first guidebook series. In addition to highlighting the role of competition, attitudes towards wealth making, the working culture of a family firm and the relationship between commercial and critical performance, this study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the changing routines of travel, consumption and commerciality in the nineteenth century.
"I was chosen out as oracular": The fin-de-siècle Journalism of Flora Annie Steel
2011
Women's Writing18(4):505-523 Informa UK Limited
The popular writer Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) is most frequently remembered as the author of the “mutiny” novel On the Face of the Waters (1896). Scholarship has tended to focus on her fiction and autobiographical writing and has taken little, if any, cognizance of her journalism. This article rectifies that lack of critical attention by offering an analysis of some of Steel's periodical articles for the Lady's Realm in 1897 and the Saturday Review between 1903 and 1904, which engaged with a number of contentious elements of the Woman Question. Steel's self-professed “oracular” pronouncements on gendered controversies relating to marriage and mother–daughter relations are situated within contemporary debates. Her use of accepted notions of femininity in a number of unconventional ways and the deployment of colonial cultural capital in gender debates are explored as she sought to take up complex progressive-conservative postures on turn-of-the-century womanhood.
"An Adamless Eden": Counterpublics and Women Writers' Sociability and the Fin de Siecle Journalism of Flora Annie Steel
February 2013
Women's History Review22(3):440-459 Informa UK Limited
This article focuses on the ‘outsider’ status of late-nineteenth-century women writers by exploring the experiences of Anglo-Indian novelist Flora Annie Steel and her responses to authorial sociability in fin-de-siècle London. Androcentric literary societies are viewed as influential sites which marginalised women writers, containing their incursion into masculine clubland and denying them access to some of the symbolic and practical benefits of professional authorship. Through the lens of Steel's experience, the discussion considers how women writers attempted to transcend exclusion through the establishment of female, literary counterpublics. Such counterpublics fostered a gendered literary consciousness that empowered women and matured in Steel's case into a political prospectus in the service of women's suffrage.
Servants of Empire: An Imperial Memoir of a British Family, by F.R.H. Du Boulay
01 August 2013
The English Historical Review128(533):991-993 Oxford University Press (OUP)
The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting ANNE COLLETT & LOUISE D'ARCENS
24 July 2012
Women's History Review22(4):697-699 Taylor & Francis
F.R.H. Du Boulay's Servants of Empire: An Imperial Memoir of a British Family’
A trustworthy interpreter between rulers and ruled: Behramji Malabari, colonial and cultural interpreter in nineteenth-century British India
2013
Social History38(1):1-25 Informa UK Limited
Colonial Representations of Rural Pujab in the Short Stories of Flora Annie Steel
Current teaching
Gráinne teaches on modules at all levels of the undergraduate History degree including:
- Trade, Colonisation and Empire
- Migration and Cultural Encounters
- Atlantic Revolutions
- Slaves, Subalterns and Settlers
- Britons Abroad: Histories of overseas travel and holidaying
She is also Course Leader for the MA Social History and teaches on the MA modules Researching Cultures, Journeys and Discoveries and the Dissertation.
For more information about or to express interest in studying on the MA Social History you can contact her at g.goodwin@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
