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Abstract: Though the Crimean War's literary reverberations within Britain have been productively analyzed, the global response to the war, particularly in British-ruled settler colonies, still merits exploration. Starting from the anomaly of a frontier between British Columbia and Russian Alaska that remained neutral in global conflict, this essay looks first at reactions to the war by Anglo-Canadian and Québécois writers, and second at the metonymic role the Near East played in representations of the conflict, epitomized by the Egyptian and Palestinian settings in Anthony Trollope's early fiction. The essay concludes by examining the Pacific, particularly the role of Hawaiian neutrality and the way Australian literary responses to Crimea signaled both identification and misidentification with the British role in the war, underscoring the semi-global quality of 1850s geopolitical literariness.
I.The Semi-Global Crimea
Any discussion of the Crimean War remarks nearly immediately that it was the "one great power war" between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War and that yet, unlike those two conflicts, it was a conflict both global and yet limited and localized (Abbenhuis 160). The Crimean War, which extended from 1854 to 1856, was fought, on the one side, by Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and, later, Sardinia (which would become the Kingdom of Italy) and by czarist Russia on the other. Since 2000, there has been a boom in literary and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Crimean War. Lara Kriegel has studied the afterlife of the Crimean War in the long nineteenth century; Mischa Willett, the intersection of the war and the short flourishing of the Spasmodic poets; Tai-Chun Ho, the impact the war had on poetry, including newspaper poetry; and Ellen Rosenman, the war's effect on British popular fiction. Stefanie Markovits, in the most recent comprehensive treatment of the war's imaginative resonance, notes that it was the first conflict to have available "improvements in the technology of information transmission," such as mail and telegraph (15). Markovits, however, treats the Crimean War as occurring mainly in a European arena. Yet recent historical scholarship, such as that of Andrew C. Rath, has explored the war in a global context, including the Pacific.
This essay makes an argument about the emergence of a plural and variegated but nonetheless coherent global literary space in...