Dr. Elleray's current research is on the intersection of popular culture, empire and missionary culture. Taking Victorian boys’ adventure texts set in the South Pacific, Elleray analyzes their historical relationship to missionary texts and organizations, and thus the dynamics of evangelicalism i...
Dr. Elleray's current research is on the intersection of popular culture, empire and missionary culture. Taking Victorian boys’ adventure texts set in the South Pacific, Elleray analyzes their historical relationship to missionary texts and organizations, and thus the dynamics of evangelicalism in the formation of imperial masculinity. Key authors studied are Frederick Marryat, R.M. Ballantyne, and W.H.G. Kingston, with Robert Louis Stevenson as riposte. Elleray also began researching a new project on nineteenth-century juvenile missionary periodicals and Pacific Island missionaries.
Elleray's most recent publications have been on: (a) the narrative foreclosure of British settlement in R. M. Ballantyne's 1857 boys' adventure novel, "The Coral Island"; (b) the representation of Pacific Island missionaries in "The Coral Island"; (c) the popularization of scientific debates about the formation of coral islands into a discourse on missionary fundraising and children’s agency in the 1840s and 1850s; and (d) the late-19th-century projection of white settler anxieties about degeneration and nation formation onto Chinese settlers in the Australian trilogy, "The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney".
Elleray is happy to supervise work on Victorian prose (gender, children’s literature, the detective novel, sensation fiction, fin-de-siècle literature, empire, missionary texts) and New Zealand and Pacific studies.