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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Settler colonialism had a formative impact on the development of English literature. As narratives of emigration and settlement critically engaged with fiction produced ‘back home’, at the imperial centre, and increasingly also with each other, they added a crucial aspect to imperialism's complex influence on both colonial and ‘metropolitan’ culture. The expansion of the British Empire and all it stood for consequently shaped literary culture both in Victorian Britain and in its colonies. It extended the confines of the traditional English novel in its choice of location and thematic concerns as well as in terms of its production and consumption. The nineteenth century was a crucial time for fiction produced in Britain's colonial settler world, laying down the foundation for new national canons. It might even be seen as marking the beginning of a global spread of ‘Anglophone’ writing or a ‘literature in English’ that ‘the nineteenth-century literary world took for granted’. But it was precisely because Victorian settler narratives displayed an ambiguous slant in addressing a twofold reader-ship – located in Britain and in the colonial peripheries – that these narratives participated in what is now beginning to be referred to as ‘nineteenth-century “global formations”’ or ‘the rise of the Anglo-world’. In metropolitan fiction, meanwhile, recourse to shifting ‘other’ spaces continually redirected the empire's function in the popular imagination.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Settler NarrativesEmigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014