Cirrus@Austlit

'The genteel society Vidal depicts is composed primarily of former tradesmen and shabby gentry from England who have managed to increase their fortunes in Australia and aspire to gentility, along with the convict or former convict servants who work for them and serve as signs of that gentility. A key aspect of Trollope's Harry Heathcote is that, as we have seen, it includes the reconciliation of a genteel squatter with a free-selector, albeit an exceptionally gentlemanly one. The squatter novels may well have contributed to this process of presenting white Australians, especially their leaders, as positive and capable figures in the English imagination. It is thus reasonable to argue that squatter novels such as Trollope's Harry Heathcote and Vidal's Bengala were part of the cultural work of creating a united Australian gentry that in turn provided both political and moral leadership for white Australians generally.'

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter examines how the devastation of a bushfire in 1851 in Australia challenged the claims of emigration advocates that it was possible simply to pack up one's life and begin again on the other side of the world through an examination of a range of literary, journalistic and epistolary responses to bushfires. It also explains how fictional accounts of bushfires oppose themselves to newspaper stories of destruction. One of the more terrifying blazes to challenge nineteenth-century settler society was the sequence of fires that took place on what came to be known as 'Black Thursday'. Writing in Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper in 1854, William Howitt emphasized the disaster's impact on settler society by comparing it to events like the English Revolution of 1688. The main purpose of the poem by George Wright and entitled 'Black Thursday' was to encourage those who had been spared the worst effects of the inferno to provide assistance to its victims.'

Source: Abstract.

'Catherine Helen Spence presents the fictional lost colony as a utopian space for the radical feminist transformation of marriage and the state. Her settlers have intermarried with an indigenous group and reinvented marriage to include a probationary period of 'handfasting' where couples live as if married for a year and a day before deciding whether they wish to confirm their relationships more permanently with marriage. Though too early to be considered a 'New Woman' novel, Handfasted positions its brand of feminism with many of the discursive strategies that late nineteenth-century New Women novelists used, including the argument that women's rights and sexual freedom would help Anglo-Saxon women act as nation and empire builders. Greater Britain offers an important theoretical lens for the novel as a whole and for Spence's brand of feminism. Dilke's Greater Britain continues, saying that America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue.'

Source: Abstract.