Antipodal England : Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Suny series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Myers, Janet C.

State University of New York Press（2009/09発売）

State University of New York Press（2009/09発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 185 p.／サイズ 1 b/w photos.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781438427133
• DDC分類 820.93526912

基本説明

Provides insight into how a wide range of authors used the colonies for strategic purposes and, in the process, often revealed the centrality of the empire to Victorian conceptions of home and national identity.

Full Description

Examines Victorian conceptions of home and identity by looking at portrayals and accounts of middle-class emigration to Australia.

A common subplot in the Victorian novel involves fictional emigrants who disappear into or arrive from the colonies in ways that facilitate plot development but do little to represent the condition of colonial life. Yet the proliferation of emigrant guides and the enthusiastic debates that punctuate Victorian periodicals indicate that emigration was a vital topic that impinged on the lives of many, if not most, Victorians. Through chapters that pair Victorian novels with visual art, letters, memoirs, and emigrant guides, Antipodal England probes this seeming inconsistency, providing insight into how a wide range of authors used the colonies for strategic purposes and, in the process, often revealed the centrality of the empire to Victorian conceptions of home and national identity. Focusing particularly on middle-class emigration to Australia, Janet C. Myers explores how emigrants transplanted a range of material and ideological practices associated with English domesticity, and how this "portable domesticity" enabled emigrants to see themselves and their culture as capable of preservation and even reinvention despite such enormous geographical and cultural shifts. Indeed, Myers argues, portable domesticity both reinforced and subverted the values of British culture, since the domestic practices that enabled emigrants to transplant their national identity also initiated the process of settlement that gradually led to the formation of a new national identity for Australia and, ultimately, independence from Britain.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction "Another English House in Another Country": Imagining Home in the Empire

1. Housekeeping at Sea and on Shore: Portable Domesticity and Emigrant Transformation

2. Performing the Voyage Out: Victorian Female Emigration and the Gendering of Displacement

3. The Fraudulent Family: Emigration, Colonial Return, and the Sensational Crimes of Empire

4. "Verily the Antipodes of Home": Narrating Domesticity in the Bush

Conclusion Portable Domesticity and Strategic Amnesia

Notes
Works Cited
Index