Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art

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 geography
• Studies 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