Imperial Emotions

Jane Lydon is Professor of History and Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia's colonial past and its legacies in the present. She worked as an archaeologist before becoming a historian, and retains an interest in diverse forms of evidence for the past, especially photographic archives.

• List of figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction: emotions and empire; 1. Children of empire: British nationalism and colonial utopias; 2. Colonial 'blind spots': images of frontier conflict; 3. Australian Uncle Tom's Cabins; 4. The homeless of empire? Imperial outcasts in Bleak House; 5. Christian heroes on the new frontier; 6. Charity begins at home? Philanthropy, magic lantern slides and missionary performances; 7. The Republican debate and popular royalism: 'a strange reluctance to actually shout at the Queen'; Bibliography; Index.

'Jane Lydon offers a scintillating and innovative analysis of the role of the emotions in binding together dispersed imperial communities, a connection critically reliant on who was excluded from the empathy at the heart of this endeavour. Attentive to a broad body of scholarship, Lydon's is a fresh and persuasive take on empire and on the history of emotions.' Philippa Levine, University of Texas, Austin