Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series

How did the emigration of nineteenth-century Britons to colonies of settlement shape Victorian literature? Philip Steer uncovers productive networks of writers and texts spanning Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to argue that the novel and political economy found common colonial ground over questions of British identity. Each chapter highlights the conceptual challenges to the nature of 'Britishness' posed by colonial events, from the gold rushes to invasion scares, and traces the literary aftershocks in familiar genres such as the bildungsroman and the utopia. Alongside lesser-known colonial writers such as Catherine Spence and Julius Vogel, British novelists from Dickens to Trollope are also put in a new light by this fresh approach that places Victorian studies in a colonial perspective. Bringing together literary formalism and British World history, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature describes how what it meant to be 'British' was re-imagined in an increasingly globalized world.

Introduction: settler colonialism and metropolitan culture; 1. The transportable pip: liberal character, territory, and the settled subject; 2. Gold and greater Britain: the Australian gold rushes, unsettled desire, and the Global British subject; 3. Speculative utopianism: colonial progress, debt, and Greater Britain; 4. Manning the imperial outpost: the invasion novel, geopolitics, and the borders of Britishness; Conclusion.

Philip Steer is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, Auckland. He is co-editor with Nathan K. Hensley of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (2018), and his essays have appeared in Victorian Studies and Victorian Literature and Culture, as well as in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism (2018) and A History of New Zealand Literature (Cambridge, 2016). He completed his doctorate at Duke University after being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. He is also the recipient of a Marsden Fund Fast-Start Grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand.