Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 The Antipodes of Victorian Fiction : Mapping 'Down Under'
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Victorian settler fiction produced in colonial Australia and New Zealand increasingly expressed a search for settler identity, and yet it partly remained targeted at readers “at home,” at the centre of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century novels of daily life in the colonial settlements, therefore, also functioned as fictional maps for readers in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in the expanding empire. While some of these publications explicitly addressed potential emigrants, others endeavoured to reshape Britain’s antipodes in the popular imagination more generally. Australian and New Zealand women writers dismantled clichés involving bush-rangers, gold-diggers, as well as escaped convicts and resented returnees. By drawing on a variety of settler novels by female authors, I aim to track how their fictional maps for readers overseas worked and how these maps shifted in the course of the century. In particular, I focus on the motif of the homecoming and how its reworking in nineteenth-century settler fiction reveals shifting attitudes towards emigration and empire, homemaking and homecoming, old and new homes.'

Source: Abstract.

Notes

  • Also discusses A Strange Friendship by Charlotte Evans and A Rolling Stone by Clara Cheeseman (both New Zealand authors).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 8 Jan 2020 13:53:30
https://victorianpopularfiction.org/publications/1200-2/victorian-popular-fictions-volume-1-issue-2-autumn-2019/victorian-popular-fictions-journal-1-2-article-3/ The Antipodes of Victorian Fiction : Mapping 'Down Under'small AustLit logo Victorian Popular Fictions
Subjects:
  • c
    Australia,
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  • c
    New Zealand,
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    Pacific Region,
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