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Chapter 4 - Manning the Imperial Outpost

The Invasion Novel, Geopolitics, and the Borders of Britishness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2019

Philip Steer
Affiliation:
Massey University, Auckland
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Summary

This chapter argues that Australia and New Zealand versions of the invasion novel crystallized an indigenized, militaristic settler masculinity that soon proved adaptable to other geopolitical contexts. Novels such as George Ranken’s The Invasion (1877) and Kenneth Mackay’s The Yellow Wave (1895) defined settler masculinity by valorizing character qualities previously associated with indigenous colonial resistance. The global circulation of that formal logic, spurred by the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), can be seen clearly in the work of Erskine Childers: alongside editing a history of the war’s guerilla phase, he reworked the invasion novel in The Riddle of the Sands (1903) to imagine countering a threat of metropolitan conflict with a colonial mindset. In World War I, the Australian and New Zealand role in the Dardanelles Campaign was also celebrated in texts such as John Masefield’s Gallipoli (1916) as a settler invasion of Europe. Casting militarized settler masculinity as “surplus value,” highly valuable and yet disposable, constitutes one final intersection of political economy and literary form, colony and metropole, arising from the Victorian settler empire.

Type
Chapter
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Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature
Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire
, pp. 161 - 201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Manning the Imperial Outpost
  • Philip Steer, Massey University, Auckland
  • Book: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 19 December 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695824.005
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  • Manning the Imperial Outpost
  • Philip Steer, Massey University, Auckland
  • Book: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 19 December 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695824.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Manning the Imperial Outpost
  • Philip Steer, Massey University, Auckland
  • Book: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 19 December 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108695824.005
Available formats
×