Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
3 - Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Narrating Domestic Portability: Emigration, Domesticity and Genre Formation
- 1 Unsettled Status in Australian Settler Novels
- 2 Agents of Empire and Feminist Rebels: Settlement and Gender in Isabella Aylmer's Distant Homes and Ellen Ellis's Everything Is Possible To Will
- 3 Reconstructing British Domesticity on the North American Frontier
- 4 Divided House, Divided Self: Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages from an Eventful Life
- 5 For Fortune and Adventure: Representations of Emigration in British Popular Fiction, 1870–1914
- 6 The Return and Rescue of the Émigré in A Tale of Two Cities
- 7 Settling Back in at Home: Impostors and Imperial Panic in Victorian Narratives of Return
- 8 Surviving Black Thursday: The Great Bushfire of 1851
- 9 ‘I am but a Stranger Everywhere’: Missionary Themes in Charlotte Yonge's New Ground and My Young Alcides
- 10 Sad Remains: Foreclosing Settlement in The Coral Island
- 11 Nineteenth-Century Female Crusoes: Rewriting the Robinsonade for Girls
- 12 ‘The Freedom Suits Me’: Encouraging Girls to Settle in the Colonies
- 13 Domestic Goddesses on the Frontier; or, Tempting the Mothers of Empire with Adventure
- 14 A ‘Curious Political and Social Experiment’: A Settler Utopia, Feminism and a Greater Britain in Catherine Helen Spence's Handfasted
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In his seminal study of national identity, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson gives pride of place to the newspaper and novel as the print forms that ‘provided the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’. The creole printman, producing his daily or weekly paper, and the newspaper reader, performing in ‘silent privacy’ a ceremony ‘replicated simultaneously by thousands … of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion’, make possible the formation of the modern nation. So, too, the novel, tracing ‘the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape … that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside’, engenders the ‘national imagination’. This chapter considers another important print form that enabled British emigrants to North America to imagine themselves within a national community: the Canadian settler memoir. By associating the British-style colonial home with the newly emerging nation, settler memoirs offered an alternative mode of creating national identity – one that was material as well as conceptual, visual as well as verbal. Settler memoirs kept emigrants loyal to their cultural origins and assigned women settlers a crucial role in nation-building.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Settler NarrativesEmigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature, pp. 55 - 70Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014