Settlers and their literatures: Camilla Cassidy, ‘Review of Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art; Philip Steer, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire’, Victoriographies, 11, 1, 2021 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers and their literatures: Camilla Cassidy, ‘Review of Fariha Shaikh, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art; Philip Steer, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire’, Victoriographies, 11, 1, 2021

02Mar21

Excerpt: That the nineteenth century was an age shaped by growing empires is hardly disputable, and it would be a stretch to suggest that it has been a question neglected by literary scholarship. But two recent monographs compellingly claim that there are omissions and misapprehensions in these accounts. Philip Steer’s Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire makes a case that hidden dynamics of mutual influence between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ can be revealed in an examination of literary form. Fariha Shaikh’s Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art sets out some ways in which textual and, to a lesser extent, visual culture described the colonies to audiences at home and to settlers in transit. Both studies illuminate how this new global reality was felt in Britain, how it shaped and was shaped by British identity and self-understanding, and how literature and art absorbed, produced and reproduced these dynamics. Both ask insightful questions about textual forms and the impact they had on settler emigration or settler colonialism (or both) and the ways in which this relationship may or may not be mutual.

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