Emigration and Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Settler Narratives

Abstract

British colonial settler narratives of the nineteenth century comprise creative prose writing set in settler spaces that were under British rule during this time period. The term chiefly refers to narratives that were written by emigrants and settlers, as well as travelers and returnees. Traditionally, scholarship on British settler colonialism centers on the individual literary histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Recent research reconsiders emigration and settler writing in the larger context of a global nineteenth century. Thus, comparative studies of the experience and representation of settlement throughout the British Empire have begun to open up new venues to explore settler narratives. Transatlantic and transoceanic approaches have helped to highlight the circulation of cultural formations across the globe at the time. Simultaneously, studies reading settler and metropolitan, or British-based, fiction in tandem have facilitated a new consideration of genre and form, allowing us to recognize the hitherto underestimated contribution of British settler narratives to genre developments. In addition, important critical work has been done in the areas of gender and domesticity as well as of empire and race, although more research needs to be undertaken on the representation of Indigenous peoples in colonial settler narratives. More recently, ecocriticism has emerged as an illuminating theoretical framework to reinvestigate settler colonialism and the narratives it produced at a time of rapid industrialization and global expansion. While these approaches have brought unexplored aspects of settler narratives to light, renewed attention to often hitherto marginalized works has had an important impact on reconsiderations of the global nineteenth century. British colonial settler narratives provide different perspectives on imperialism, globalization, and the encounter with Indigenous populations. In addition, the gradual expansion of a canon of settler writing provides insight into the experience of women, who often turned to and thereby transformed different genres of writing. Thus the still seldom discussed domestic settler fiction deliberately upends narratives of exploration and adventure. As these contrasting texts exemplify, record, and at times constructively complicate the circulation of literary culture, they prompt us to reexamine how the globe was drastically reshaped through mass emigration and settler cultures that deliberately transformed the environment.