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'Shaikh's provocative study is a timely addition to the scholarship on empire and form. Notable for its willingness to use literary means to draw together a range of archival materials and other media forms, her book examines the defining influence of nineteenth-century settler emigration on metropolitan and colonial life, even while she remains alert to the indigenous experiences suppressed by the literary record of England's white diaspora.' Nathan K. Hensley, Georgetown University Demonstrates how the textual output of settler emigration shapes the nineteenth-century literary and artistic imagination Textual Cultures of Settler Emigration in Nineteenth-Century 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, Textual Cultures brings emigrants' letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and accounts of settlement 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. Fariha Shaikh is Lecturer at the School of English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Cover image; Emigrants and Emigrant Life, from Harper's Weekly, June 26, 1858 (c) akg-images Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-3369-3 Barcode
About the author
Dr Fariha Shaikh is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the School of English, Drama, American & Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research focusses on the complex junctures in the nineteenth century between genre, form and globalisation. Her monograph, published by Edinburgh University Press, explores the relationships between the mobility and materiality of literature in the context of nineteenth-century settler colonialism.
Summary
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.
