Empire of Culture: Lolita Fashion in Singapore and Other Post-imperial Incarnations of the Victorian

Empire of Culture: Neo-Victorian Narratives in the Global Creative Economy (SUNY Press, June 2024) adopts a transnational and transhistorical approach in examining representations of Victorian Britain in an array of contemporary cultural texts and practices, both literary and popular, from four geographical locations: Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore. Empire of Culture brings together these contemporary re-imaginings of Victorian Britain to reveal how the nation’s imperial past inheres in the ways post-imperial subjects—both in and outside of Britain—commodify and consume “culture” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The globalisation of English literature in the nineteenth century, along with British forms of dress, dining, and etiquette, gave rise to the idea that British culture is a universal standard to which everyone should aspire. By examining neo-Victorian narratives ranging from A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Japanese Lolita fashion in Singapore, Empire of Culture argues that the British heritage industry today thrives on the persistence of this presumed universality of British culture. Yet the British heritage industry also competes and collaborates with the US and Japanese cultural industries, as they, too, engage with the legacy of British universalism to carve out their own empires in a global creative economy.

Dr Waiyee Loh is Associate Professor of World Literature at Kanagawa University in Yokohama, Japan. Her research and teaching interests centre on the history of British and Japanese imperialism and their legacies today. Empire of Culture is her first book.