Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art

by Fariha Shaikh

Overview

Demonstrates how the textual output of settler emigration shapes the nineteenth-century literary and artistic imagination
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. Arguing that the demographic shift to settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand was supported and underpinned by a vast outpouring of text, this monograph brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and settler fiction into conversation with the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Catherine Helen Spence and Ford Madox Brown, amongst others. The monograph demonstrates how the textual cultures of settler emigration pervaded the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and provided authors and artists with a means of interrogating representations of space and place, home-making and colonial encounters.
Key features
First study to make the case for the literature arising from nineteenth-century settler emigration as the distinct genre of ‘emigration literature’Interdisciplinary approach combining literary criticism, art history and cultural geographyStudies canonical authors and artists (Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Richard Redgrave, Abraham Solomon, and Thomas Webster) alongside ephemera, leading to an integrated and comprehensive study of settler culture

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474433693
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	06/06/2018
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr Fariha Shaikh is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the School of English, Drama, American & Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research focusses on the complex junctures in the nineteenth century between genre, form and globalisation. Her monograph, published by Edinburgh UniversityPress, explores the relationships between the mobility and materiality of literature in the context of nineteenth-century settler colonialism.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Printed Emigrants’ Letters: Networks of Affect and Authenticity
2. Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers: Provisional Settlement at Sea
3. Fragmentary Aesthetics: Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill in the Canadian Bush
4. Emigration Paintings: Visual Texts and Mobility
5. Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

Conclusion: Structures of Mobility

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Shaikh’s provocative study is a timely addition to the scholarship on empire and form. Notable for its willingness to use literary means to draw together a range of archival materials and other media forms, her book examines the defining influence of nineteenth-century settler emigration on metropolitan and colonial life, even while she remains alert to the indigenous experiences suppressed by the literary record of Britain’s white diaspora.

Georgetown University Nathan K. Hensley

Shaikh’s provocative study is a timely addition to the scholarship on empire and form. Notable for its willingness to use literary means to draw together a range of archival materials and other media forms, her book examines the defining influence of nineteenth-century settler emigration on metropolitan and colonial life, even while she remains alert to the indigenous experiences suppressed by the literary record of Britain’s white diaspora.

Editorial Reviews

Shaikh’s provocative study is a timely addition to the scholarship on empire and form. Notable for its willingness to use literary means to draw together a range of archival materials and other media forms, her book examines the defining influence of nineteenth-century settler emigration on metropolitan and colonial life, even while she remains alert to the indigenous experiences suppressed by the literary record of Britain’s white diaspora.

Georgetown University Nathan K. Hensley

Fariha Shaikh’s Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art is a valuable intervention in this burgeoning scholarly field [...] Particularly welcome is Shaikh’s expansive definition of the literary which enables her to bring her attentive close-reading skills to bear on a range of print cultural artefacts that do not usually receive much scholarly attention.

Journal of Victorian Literature - Lara Atkin

This book interestingly explains ‘the multifarious and competing ways in which nineteenth-century settler emigration intersected with nineteenth-century print culture and textuality’ (3). It is full of flashes of insight and shows ‘emigration literature redefined people’s relationship to place’ and, in common with Steer’s work, shows how this material produced ‘complicated circuits of textual exchange between metropole and colony’ (6).

Victoriographies - Camilla Cassidy

Un-making Victorian studies involves exploding the field’s limited geographic imaginary, which continues to exhibit particular difficulties in dismantling a center/periphery model and its attendant forms of knowledge, despite the efforts of scholars such as [...] Fariha Shaikh.

Victorian Studies - Ronjaunee Chatterjee

Fluently written in an accessible and clear style, Shaikh’s work analyzes an important and underexplored aspect of nineteenth-century British settler emigration and the mobility in which it was enmeshed.

Victorian Studies - Cecilia Morgan

Exploring the legacy of settler literature opens new theoretical frameworks and enhances our interpretations of empire and imperial progress [Shaikh] reminds critics of the importance of the material form of emigrant literature, which was in many ways defined by its transience.

Victorian Periodicals Review - Jennifer Fuller