Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore ... More

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore the generic features of emigration literature: textual mobility, a sense of place and colonial home-making. Authors and artists discussed in this book include, among others, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Susannah Moodie, Catherine Helen Spence, Catharine Parr Traill and Thomas Webster. The book’s careful analysis of the aesthetics of emigration literature demonstrates the close relationships between textual and demographic mobilities, textual materiality and realism, and the spatial imagination.