Introduction

Summary

The Introduction begins with the challenge of understanding the impact of settler colonialism on Victorian literary culture when it is largely invisible as a subject. It proposes that settler colonialism reveals common ground between the novel and political economy, centered on their shared investments in the Scottish Enlightenment’s stadial theory of societal development, which saw settled cultivation as the threshold to civilization, culture, and capital. Drawing on the claims of British world history, I argue that the cultural texts of settler colonialism were inseparable from its financial considerations throughout the Victorian period, while Franco Moretti’s model of “place-bound” genre offers a localized understanding of literary form that allows for the shaping influence of settler environments. When ideas of British subjectivity and society were challenged by events in Australia and New Zealand, writers responded through formal innovations in the novel and political economy. In addition, retracing imperial networks of influence and exchange brings to light the material pathways that allowed specific settler revisions of British identity to reshape metropolitan writing.