Nineteenth Century Settler Emigration In British Literature And Art

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art is the first book to undertake a comprehensive survey of the literature produced by nineteenth-century settler emigration.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.

Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century.

This book examines the intersections among literary works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins, journalism, parliamentary records and pamphlets, to establish Britain's imaginative investment in the seismic geopolitical realignment of Italian unification.

An unprecedented number of emigrants left Britain to settle in America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the Victorian period. Utilizing new digital resources and methodologies alongside more traditional modes of scholarship, British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877 presents the first book-length study of the periodical print culture that imagined, mediated, and galvanized this important stage of empire history. It presents extensive new research on how settler emigration was registered within Victorian periodicals and situates its focus on British texts and contexts within a broader, transnational framework. The book argues that the Victorian periodical was an inherently mobile form which had an unrivalled capacity to both register mass settler emigration and moderate its disruptive potential. Part One focuses on settler emigration genres that featured within mainstream, middle-class periodicals, incorporating the analysis of emigrant voyage texts, emigration themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about settlement. These genres are cohesive, domestic, and reassuring, and thus of a different character from the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. Part Two examines a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often challenged dominant settler ideologies. Alongside its examination of ephemeral emigration texts, the book offers fresh readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and others. Ultimately, the book shows how periodical settler emigration literature transforms our understanding of both the culture of Victorian empire and Victorian literature and culture as a whole. It also makes significant intersections into debates about periodical form and the role of digitization within Victorian Studies.

Explores radical designs for the home in the nineteenth-century metropolis and the texts that shaped themUncovers a series of innovative housing designs that emerged in response to London's rapid growth and expansion throughout the nineteenth century Brings together the writing of prominent authors such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing with understudied novels and essays to examine the lively literary engagement with new models of urban housing Focuses on the ways that these new homes provided material and creative space for thinking through the relationship between home and identity Identifies ways in which we might learn from the creative responses to the nineteenth-century housing crisis This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It examines visual and literary representations to explain how these innovations in housing forged opportunities for refashioning definitions of home and identity. Robertson offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which novels imaginatively and materially produce the city's built environment.

This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters.