EDITORS' TOPIC: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim
Introduction
INTRODUCTION: THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PACIFIC RIM: VICTORIAN TRANSOCEANIC STUDIES BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL MATRIX
- Tamara S. Wagner
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 223-234
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the Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined themselves to a vicarious enjoyment of the gold-nuggets that seem to lay scattered throughout the expanding settler world, of adventures in an excitingly exoticised “bush,” and of shipwrecks and dubious impostors who sometimes seemed to return from the middle of nowhere. Readers could even indulge in a smugly self-congratulatory sense of amusement when witnessing the satirised ignorance of Flora Finching in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857), when she famously evokes semi-colonial China as such
With its bizarre juxtaposition of exotic references and vague gesticulations towards imperial commerce's impact at home, Flora's confusion is first and foremost funny, and readers were clearly meant to recognise it as such. In the same vein, adventure tales set in far-off islands in the Pacific or in new settlements in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand certainly continued to feature the enticingly wild and exotic. Yet increasingly, popular fiction made it clear that we ought to know more about the world out there, and that this entailed a different sense of responsibility as well. It is tellingly the satirised, pompous characters who wildly joke about the hero's escapades “down under” in Anthony Trollope's John Caldigate (1879), while the novel instead shows that the widespread notion “that anything done in the wilds of Australia ought not ‘to count’ here, at home in England” (322; ch. 42) does no longer hold in a world that is clearly not only expanding, but contracting and narrowing in the process. But if these widely read Victorian triple-deckers show how aware readers were becoming of the British presence throughout the world – including such indisputably still mystified, exoticised places as China – and how this impacted on literature and culture “back home,” the way the Victorians thought about, imagined, and discussed their own shifting place in this changing world was markedly wide and varied. Public interest in sinology, for example, as reflected in the magazines of the time, or contradictory accounts by missionaries, military officers, and emigration societies, and how these discourses were worked into popular culture productions, all testify to an ambiguous, contested field. The depiction of settler societies in particular underwent enormous shifts in the course of the century. How the most persistent images of the expanding settler and commercial empire were generated and circulated in Victorian Britain can be gleaned from shipboard diaries, popular ballads, broadsides, as well as from more official accounts such as the manuals and pamphlets produced by emigration societies. A close analysis of this rarely discussed material, in turn, compels a reconsideration of the way literary works engaged with discourses on emigration, travel, and imperial adventure. In going beyond what we see merely reflected in Victorian canonical literature, this special issue on nineteenth-century representations of the region spanning, roughly, what we now consider the Pacific Rim allows us to get a wider perspective on what “the Victorians” made of the changing world around them.a country to live in for so long a time, and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too how very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be made by those two trades where everybody carries them and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a traveller you are! (152; ch. 13)
Research Article
TRANSPORTED TO BOTANY BAY: IMAGINING AUSTRALIA IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONVICT BROADSIDES
- Dorice Williams Elliott
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 235-259
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The speaker of this ballad (circa 1828) laments the fact that, though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” a popular name for Australia. Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. Like this fictional speaker, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder – but mostly theft – were transported to one of the new British colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while other felons were sentenced for fourteen years to life for more serious crimes. While non-fictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales were published in Britain almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes. Since books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied considerably, few of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. Several descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return. But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people.
“SAVING BRITISH NATIVES”: FAMILY EMIGRATION AND THE LOGIC OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CHARLES DICKENS AND CAROLINE CHISHOLM
- Terra Walston Joseph
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 261-280
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As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”
SELF-MADE MAIDS: BRITISH EMIGRATION TO THE PACIFIC RIM AND SELF-HELP NARRATIVES
- Melissa Walker
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 281-304
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The victorian discourse of self-help, popularized by Samuel Smiles in the mid-nineteenth century, was integral to the success of mid-Victorian British emigration and colonialism. As Robert Hogg notes in his study of British colonial violence in British Columbia and Queensland, Samuel Smiles's notion of character, which embraced the virtues of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and energetic action, helped sanction masculine colonial violence and governance in these regions (23–24). According to Robert Grant in his examination of mid-Victorian emigration to Canada and Australia, one's desire “to better him or herself” was closely entwined with Smiles's self-help philosophy and the rhetoric of colonial promotion permeating British self-help texts “in the projection of the laborer's progress from tenant to smallholder to successful landowner through hard work” (178–79). Francine Tolron similarly observes the pervasiveness of the success narrative in emigrant accounts of New Zealand, noting that this story often constitutes “yet another tale of the British march of Progress” (169) with the yeoman, John Bull, as the hero at its centre, who adopts the imperialist impetus to subdue the wilderness and recreate an ideal England in which a man can earn gentility through hard work and uprightness of character (169–70). She extends accounts by male emigrants to New Zealand to the “collective psyche” of all New Zealanders “whose stuff is made up of earth, so to speak, the inheritors of the old archetypal Englishman who worked on the land before the dawn of the industrial era” (173). These studies contribute significantly to a growing body of scholarship that considers the connections between self-help literature and British emigration and colonialism. Yet, occasionally such analyses apply the meaning of self-help rhetoric universally across British male and female emigrant groups when the rise from tenant to landowner was typically a male, not a female, prerogative. Building on this important body of work, this paper considers how domestic concerns, rather than a sole focus on controlling foreign lands and people, informed versions of success penned by a particular group of mid-Victorian middle-class female emigrants and these women's understanding of their positioning within the colonies.
FEMININITY AND COMMUNITY AT HOME AND AWAY: SHIPBOARD DIARIES BY SINGLE WOMEN EMIGRANTS TO NEW ZEALAND
- Lilja Mareike Sautter
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 305-316
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New Zealand experienced a massive influx of European immigrants in the 1870s and early 1880s after the introduction of Julius Vogel's assisted immigration programme. Single women under the age of thirty-five were a significant target group of recruitment schemes. They were expected to contribute to the colony's labour force as domestic servants and balance New Zealand's surplus of male settlers by becoming wives and mothers. Many of these young women had never been away from home until they embarked on their hazardous journey halfway around the world. Elizabeth Fairbairn, a single woman emigrant herself, was the matron in charge of the young women travelling to New Zealand on board the Oamaru in 1877–78. She narrates in her shipboard diary that Christmas Day made many of the single women homesick: “A great many of the girls grew downhearted last night and had such a good cry, poor things I was sorry for them, for the heart does feel things at a time like this and it is the first time a good many of them have been from home” (25 Dec. 1877). Jane Finlayson was one of these homesick “girls” on the same ship a year earlier. On 22 September 1876 she writes in her diary: “After parting with our friends at Greenock and thinking that ‘Whatever be our earthly lot, Wherever we may roam, Still to our heart the brightest spot, Is round the hearth at home’ we came with the tug on board this ship.” Having left their old home, the women emigrants spent three months crammed into an uncomfortable steerage compartment, honing domestic skills such as sewing and knitting. The ship became a temporary home in which the emigrants prepared for their future life in New Zealand. Metropolitan notions of femininity which located women in the private, domestic sphere had to be questioned and modified on board. While the single women's compartment was supposed both to become a home away from home and to represent a domestic setting, the transitional and public nature of shipboard space complicated both of these projects. This ambiguity relates to an image of single women which was similarly contradictory. The single woman emigrant was a figure at the centre of discourses of femininity and community: on her centred hope but also anxiety. Like in other settler colonies, it was imagined in New Zealand that women would exert beneficial moral and religious influence upon male-dominated colonial society. Women were thus expected to act as creators of community, both ideologically through their moral influence and physically by bearing children. However, until they got married, single women also represented a threat: they were often held responsible for the increase in prostitution in New Zealand (Macdonald 180). This illustrates the danger women could embody: again, both ideologically, since prostitution was seen as contaminating the moral character of society, and physically, since deviant sexual activity was often seen as undermining the biological purity of the community. How did such notions of femininity and community travel from Britain to New Zealand? How were they constructed and redefined during the transitional period of the voyage? In order to explore these questions this essay discusses two texts that also travelled, and narrate travelling: the two shipboard diaries by Elizabeth Fairbairn and Jane Finlayson referenced above, which look at single women's experience of emigration from the slightly different perspectives of a matron and a young woman under the care of a matron. The figure of the matron is an ambiguous one within the notion of women as representing both hope and anxiety: she is not married but nevertheless in a position of relative authority compared to the other single women on board. Elizabeth Fairbairn's diary represents her efforts to create unity among the women under her charge by submitting all of them to the same ideology of femininity. However, her text also has to deal with her own complicated status within the social structure of the ship. Jane Finlayson's text aims to contain anxiety and ambiguity by framing subversive and frightening events within the generic conventions of a shipboard diary. It negotiates the position of the single women on board while simultaneously reaffirming this position.
CHANCE, PROVIDENCE, AND IMPERIAL ENNUI IN ALFRED DOMETT’S RANOLF AND AMOHIA: A SOUTH-SEA DAY-DREAM
- Hugh Roberts
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 317-341
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“I have read your poems – you can do anything” wrote Robert Browning to his close friend Alfred Domett on May 22, 1842, shortly after the latter had emigrated to New Zealand (Browning, Domett and Arnould 35). If this was in part friendly overpraise of Domett's verse, it was also a prognostication as to the effect of emigration. The idea (which also underlies Browning's poetic treatment of Domett's departure in the figure of Waring who “gave us all the slip”) was that “partial retirement and stopping the ears against the noise outside” would open up the possibility of something startlingly new: the little I, or anybody, can do as it is, comes of them going to New Zealand. . . . What I meant to say was – that only in your present condition of life, so far as I can see, is there any chance of your being able to find out . . . (sic) what is wanted, and how to supply the want when you precisely find it (35).
ROMANCES OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: SPATIALITY, TRADE, AND FORM IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S PACIFIC NOVELS
- Philip Steer
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 343-356
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In the late 1880s, around the time he decided to settle on the Samoan island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson's writing began to take a strikingly different shape as he attempted to infuse it with the flavor of his new surroundings. “When Stevenson traveled to the margins of the empire,” John Kucich observes, “he suddenly found new ways of organizing his narratives” (59). His novel-length Pacific works The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide(1894), both nominally co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, made a marked departure from the dominant models for representing imperial space and themes provided by his own Treasure Island (1883) and by H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), and they were generally met by critics with bemusement and disappointment. One reviewer of The Ebb-Tide began by observing, “It certainly has no claim to a place with those romances which are already ranked among the classics of our tongue,” and concluded sorrowfully: “This is not the Stevenson we love, but it is something to be read and remembered, nevertheless” (qtd. in Maixner 458, 59). While recent critical interest in Stevenson's Pacific fiction has tended to focus on works such as “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and the portrayal of cultural encounter, The Wrecker in particular continues to be held in low regard. As Stephen Arata summarizes,
Yet the fact that The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide are not only Stevenson's two longest Pacific-themed works of fiction, but are also marked by similar structural elements and thematic preoccupations, suggests the value of reconsidering their centrality to his engagement with the increasing western domination of the region in the last decades of the century.[M]ost critics have dismissed it as overly diffuse, shapeless, and more than a little self-indulgent – the closest thing to a loose baggy monster that Stevenson ever produced. Frank McLynn's assessment is representative: while The Wrecker, he says, is “in some ways the oddest and most intriguing” of Stevenson's novels, it is finally a failure because it lacks a “proper story structure” and because “there are far too many diversions and irrelevancies that clog the action.” (par. 7)
CIVILIZING HAWAII: ISABELLA BIRD BISHOP IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS
- Precious McKenzie Stearns
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 357-370
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Nineteenth-century male European travel writers sometimes romanticize their destinations and dream they have arrived in untouched lands. The Hawaii Isabella Bird visited, however, was not an idyllic land, forgotten by time. Early in the nineteenth century, steamships crossed the Pacific, carrying goods and people from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan. The trade in sandalwood and fur brought many foreign steamships into Hawaii (Kuykendall 15). It was not uncommon for American missionaries to arrive in Hawaii via whaling ships that stopped in Hawaii (Kuykendall 16, 41). Hawaii, with its position between mainland America and Asia, was a valuable and strategic piece of property. Isabella Bird Bishop's 1875 travel memoir The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands comments on the political situation the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) faced in the nineteenth century.
MISSING LINK FOUND, 1880: THE RHETORIC OF COLONIAL PROGRESS IN ISABELLA BIRD’S UNBEATEN TRACKS IN JAPAN
- Joohyun Jade Park
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 371-388
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In Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Isabella Bird, one of the most celebrated travel writers of her time and the first female member of the Royal Geographical Society, asserts that she has found “the ‘MISSING LINK’” in the deep interior of Japan, on the island of Hokkaido (270). According to Bird, a wizened individual barely resembling man sits “crouched” in front of a disheveled hut, showing no “signs of intelligence” (270). In fact, this “missing link” Bird purports to have discovered was one of the Ainu, the native people of Hokkaido, who suffered the consequences of Japanese developmental schemes. Bird's identification of the forlorn figure as the “missing link,” an anachronistic being that lacks history and culture, is puzzling, as she encounters this haggard man after having already spent several days with the Ainu in Biratory, a small village in Hokkaido. During her stay, the Ainu villagers constantly speak of the strained relationship between themselves and the Japanese, as well as their discontent at Japanese prohibitions on Ainu traditions. In other words, they divulge the oppressiveness of Japan's so-called “modernizing” regulations and policies, and they attempt to inform their visitor of the history between the two conflicting peoples. However, their efforts seem to be lost on Bird. Rather than interpret the Ainu individual's ruined body as a corporeal text on which the history of colonial violence and exclusion is imprinted, Bird judges the man's beastly existence to be the evidence of his people's inferiority.
INVOLUNTARY SIGHTSEEING: SOLDIERS AS TRAVEL WRITERS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF COLONIAL BURMA
- Stephen Keck
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 389-407
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British Burma has never been adequately or even systematically studied as both students of modern Burmese history and British empire historians have given it relatively short shrift. Nonetheless, imperial rule lasted for nearly five generations and helped to produce the nation which now identifies itself as Myanmar. By the end of the nineteenth century, Burma was crucial to the wider South Asian economy, supplying oil, minerals, teak, and, above all, rice to destinations around the Indian Ocean. Yet, it took three Anglo-Burmese Wars to make Burma a part of British India. These conflicts are largely forgotten but they determined not only the fate of the country, but helped to shape its future trajectories. Military conflict proved more durable than colonization as independence brought with it a situation in which the “state has been continuously at war with the population mapped into its territorial claim” (Callahan 13). Nonetheless, the intellectual and cultural history of British Burma is rich and fascinating: colonial authors made the country their subject matter and they left behind a diverse corpus which bore the stamp of Victorian civilization. The experience of writing about Burma – particularly by those writers who identified with Burmese culture – produced some forgotten masterpieces. However, the dominant British understanding of the country arose from military conflict and occupation; this paper focuses on four British war narratives (which followed each of the Anglo-Burmese Wars) because they disclose more than their recounting of these conflicts might suggest. By exploring the works of John James Snodgrass, Henry Gouger, William F. B. Laurie, and Major Edmond Charles Browne, it will be possible to trace the beginnings of the colonizing narrative which helped to shape British rule. These writers experienced the Anglo-Burmese Wars directly and their narratives illustrate that they were “involuntary sightseers” recording not only the details of conflict, but their assessments of Burma and the Burmese.
CIVILIZED DEPRAVITY: EVANGELICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF EARLY-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA AND THE REDEFINITION OF “TRUE CIVILIZATION”
- Benjamin Fischer
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 409-429
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In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE IN THE SATURDAY REVIEW: A CASE STUDY IN SINOPHOBIA’S SCHOLARLY ROOTS
- Anna Peak
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- 25 February 2015, pp. 431-444
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A drastic shift in British perceptions of China took place between the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. Up through the first decades of the nineteenth century, China and its ideals as well as its art and aesthetic were widely admired. Yet by the end of the century, the discourse surrounding China had become very different: no longer were the Chinese admired for their art or their morals; instead, they were castigated as amoral, pitiless, inscrutable liars. Why and how this change took place has not yet been explored in part because scholars have tended to focus on either the beginning of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, rather than on the years between these periods. Yet those years saw the rise of sinology, which became established as a field of scholarship in precisely the period (from roughly 1870 to 1901) that has so far been neglected. This scholarship, highly specialized though it might seem (and was), was not confined to the Ivory Tower; it made its way to the educated, upper-middle-class reading public through periodicals. If we look at what British periodicals were teaching their readers about China and the Chinese language during this gap period, we can see – perhaps surprisingly – a concerted and earnest effort being made to avoid assumptions that the Chinese need British help and to avoid pro-Christian judgments, in favor of an attempt to learn the workings of the Chinese language as the first step towards understanding the Chinese on their own terms. What scholars learn and what periodicals teach about the Chinese language, however, leads these very same would-be enlightened people, in the end, to see the Chinese as cunning children incapable of complex thought or basic feeling, and therefore incapable of progress or morality. In other words, the increasing British prejudice against the Chinese originated to an important degree in the work of the first scholars of sinology, rather than in the fears of the ignorant or the culturally-marginalized. Examining this process challenges a paradigm dominant in postcolonial studies, in which modern scholars decry the supremacy of Western systems while problematically replicating a narrative in which the concept of Western systemic supremacy is not challenged and the existence of non-Western systems is not acknowledged. In the case of China, the complexity of its written and spoken language systems helped frustrate Western efforts at colonization, and this systemic resistance to Western domination was constructed by Western scholars in such a way as to create and justify sinophobia.
Front Cover (OFC, IFC) and matter
VLC volume 43 issue 2 Cover and Front matter
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- 12 May 2015, pp. f1-f11
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VLC volume 43 issue 2 Cover and Back matter
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- 12 May 2015, pp. b1-b3
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