Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art Philip Steer, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-106
Author(s):  
Camilla Cassidy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Settler Colonialism

“SAVING BRITISH NATIVES”: FAMILY EMIGRATION AND THE LOGIC OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CHARLES DICKENS AND CAROLINE CHISHOLM

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-280
Author(s):  
Terra Walston Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Emotional Identification

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”

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

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace Moore
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
British Society ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
To Come

At the beginning of his 1873 Australasian travelogue, Anthony Trollope observed that the future prospects of Australia and New Zealand “involved the happiness of millions to come of English-speaking men and women” while noting that “it has been impossible to avoid speculations as to their future prospects”.  Philip Steer’s carefully-argued study of colonial settler writing in and about the Antipodes considers the cultural exchange between the Australasian colonies and the mother country, noting the importance of colonial culture to English realist writing.  Positioning his work as a “sustained reckoning with Edward Gibbon Wakefield”, for Steer “the evolving frenzy of exploitation and transformation in the settler colonies put pressure on metropolitan forms of the novel and political economy, and provided new conceptual vocabularies for understanding British society and subjectivity”.  In order to examine some of this pressure, Steer considers a range of authors—Victorian celebrities like Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, alongside lesser-known writers including Catherine Spence and Henry Crocker Marriott Watson.  He also seeks to re-evaluate how settler colonialism sits within Victorian writing generally, making a very convincing case for reconsidering the sense of overseas settlements as simply convenient places to which problematic characters might be banished.

The reception of antiquity in nineteenth-century British literature – an attempt at theoretical synthesis

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-160
Author(s):  
Agata Buda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Research Material ◽  
Theoretical Synthesis ◽  
Critical Approaches

Abstract The aim of the paper is to make an attempt of theoretical synthesis connected with the idea of reception studies. It presents major aspects which are crucial for understanding the reception studies, especially for the reception of antiquity in Victorian literature (for instance chosen critical approaches to literature, contemporary tools for conducting the research like intertextuality). The paper also presents definitions of classics, classical tradition and reception and tries to explain why Victorian times and literature are a perfect research material to examine the reception of antiquity.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

scholarly journals Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098201
Author(s):  
Sarah Comyn ◽  
Porscha Fermanis
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Canons ◽  
Methodological Position

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

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