Victorian Settler Narratives:

Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature

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Editor: Tamara S Wagner

Gender and Genre

The nineteenth century saw the British Empire at its height. With it came a rapidly expanding English-speaking world and a growing literature to serve it. This collection from a distinguished group of contributors explores a range of topics including literature as imperialist propaganda, the representation of the colonies in British literature, the emergence of literary culture in the colonies and the creation of new gender roles such as ‘girl Crusoes’ in works of fiction. Based on the comparative study of texts and drawing on examples from throughout the empire, this book has a unique scope, shedding new light on the Victorian settler world and its cultural impact.

Sample pages

• Introduction
• Index

Readership

Literature, Colonial & Post-Colonial Studies and Gender Studies

Contents

Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation – Tamara S Wagner
1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels – Dorice Williams Elliott
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 – Kirstine Moffat
3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier – Linda H Peterson
4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie’s Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life – Mary Ellen Kappler
5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914 – Amy J Lloyd
6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities – John McBratney
7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return – Tamara S Wagner
8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851 – Grace Moore
9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge’s New Ground and My Young Alcides – Susan Walton
10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island – Michelle Elleray
11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls – Michelle J Smith
12 'The Freedom Suits Me': Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies – Kristine Moruzi
13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure – Terri Doughty
14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism, and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence’s Handfasted – Terra Walston Joseph

Related titles

• British Immigration to the United States, 1776–1914
• British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies on the Self and Other
• Empires in Perspective
• Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Consolidation, 1835–1910
• Travels, Explorations and Empires, 1770–1835: Travel Writings on North America, the Far East, North and South Poles and the Middle East
• Women Writing Home, 1700–1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire

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