Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire

✍ Scribed by Philip Steer

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 250
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How did the emigration of nineteenth-century Britons to colonies of settlement shape Victorian literature? Philip Steer uncovers productive networks of writers and texts spanning Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to argue that the novel and political economy found common colonial ground over questions of British identity. Each chapter highlights the conceptual challenges to the nature of 'Britishness' posed by colonial events, from the gold rushes to invasion scares, and traces the literary aftershocks in familiar genres such as the bildungsroman and the utopia. Alongside lesser-known colonial writers such as Catherine Spence and Julius Vogel, British novelists from Dickens to Trollope are also put in a new light by this fresh approach that places Victorian studies in a colonial perspective. Bringing together literary formalism and British World history, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature describes how what it meant to be 'British' was re-imagined in an increasingly globalized world.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Settler Colonialism and Metropolitan Culture
British Identity, Literature, and the Victorian Settler Empire
Stadial Theory, Settlement, and Literary Form
Metropolitan Culture and the Networks of Empire
Victorian Literature and the Victorian Settler Empire
Chapter 1 The Transportable Pip: Liberal Character, Territory, and the Settled Subject
Stadial Theory and Systematic Colonization: A Letter from Sydney
The Romance and the Problem of Mobility: Arabin
Extending the Borders of Britishness: The Caxtons and David Copperfield
Character in the Penal Colony: The Mark System
Charles Dickens and the Mark System: Urania Cottage, or the Home for Homeless Women
The Bildungsroman, the Mark System, and Metropolitan Character: Great Expectations
Metropolitan Forms and the Networks of Empire
Chapter 2 Gold and Greater Britain: The Australian Gold Rushes, Unsettled Desire, and the Global British Subject
Settled Society and the Problem of the Gold Rushes: Clara Morison
The Aesthetics and Economics of Extraction: Land, Labour, and Gold
Unsettled Desire in Political Economy: Plutology
Colonial Gold and the Form of Metropolitan Economics: Jevons's Theory of Political Economy
Colonial Gold and the Form of the Metropolitan Novel: John Caldigate
Bridging Metropolitan and Colonial Space
Chapter 3 Speculative Utopianism: Colonial Progress, Debt, and Greater Britain
Culture, Investment, and Utopia: A First Year in Canterbury Settlement and Erewhon
Borrowing on British Character: New Zealand's Debt
Metropolitan Sovereignty and Settler Dystopia: The Fixed Period
Speculative Utopianism and Geopolitics: Anno Domini 2000 and Decline and Fall of the British Empire
Chapter 4 Manning the Imperial Outpost: The Invasion Novel, Geopolitics, and the Borders of Britishness
The Invasion Novel in the Settler Colony: From The Battle of Dorking to The Invasion
Maori Resistance and Settler Masculinity: New Zealand in the Next Great War
Indigenized British Character in Australia: The Yellow Wave
The Settler Soldier in South Africa
Metropolitan Territory and Colonial Subjectivity: The Riddle of the Sands
Gallipoli and the Surplus Value of the Settler Colony
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index