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

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

Philip Steer (Author)

9781108735858, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 February 2022

247 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.367 kg

'Steer's book is deeply researched and densely argued, but very readable.' Dominic Rainsford, Dickens Quarterly

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.

Introduction: settler colonialism and metropolitan culture
1. The transportable pip: liberal character, territory, and the settled subject
2. Gold and greater Britain: the Australian gold rushes, unsettled desire, and the Global British subject
3. Speculative utopianism: colonial progress, debt, and Greater Britain
4. Manning the imperial outpost: the invasion novel, geopolitics, and the borders of Britishness
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]