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Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere aims to fill a gap within Literary and Cultural Studies by undertaking the analysis of concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, precarity and resistance in a wide range of cultural texts written in English and published or circulated in the last two decades across a wide geography encompassing India, Ireland, Canada, the USA and the UK: memoirs and testimonies, films, TV series, crime fiction and literary fiction. Thus, the collection provides a rich array of cultural case studies to explore gender vulnerability in a transnational framework, in turn providing fresh insights into vulnerability itself as a “travelling theory,” following Edward Said’s formulation (The World, the Text, the Critic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983).

The British Empire has become a new trope in neo-Victorian studies, incorporating a postcolonial trans-national approach to the re-writing of the Victorian past. Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River is set in Australia in the early nineteenth century when issues of transportation and colonisation coalesce with the fight for survival under precarious conditions. The Secret River is the story of the confrontation between colonisers and colonised people in terms of gender and vulnerability. This chapter analyses the role of Empire in the construction of a British identity associated with civilisation and that of the native population. Following Judith Butler’s theories, my discussion is organised around two main topics: Australian history and narratives of recollection, and gender identity and vulnerability both in white settlers and indigenous communities. My contention is that both sides became involved in a relationship of mutual vulnerability.