(via the VICTORIA list . . . )
We invite proposals for essays on Victorian settler narratives. How were new settlements, forms of emigration, and various cultural and especially literary exchanges represented in narratives produced and circulated on both sides of the Atlantic as well as across the Pacific? How did transatlantic or transpacific representation reshape the literary or visual imagination in Victorian Britain? How was the settler, the emigrant, the exile, or the sojourner differently conceptualised in the course of the long nineteenth century?
The proposed collection seeks to explore anew a global nineteenth century by combining a comparative study of texts (visual as well as literary) with close readings that address issues of intertextual interchanges, genre formation, and a new mapping of literary history that looks beyond the confines of national boundaries.
Suggested topics may include:
- Settling in the colonies
- Settler and other colonies
- “English colonies” in Europe
- “the English” in nineteenth-century American literature or art
- Australasia in British literature or art
- The “lost” colony in the Americas
- The transatlantic and the transpacific
- Cautionary tales of emigration
- Repatriation
- Portable domesticity
- Self-exiles
- Expatriate communities in the nineteenth century
- Missionary settlements
- Military settlements
- Intertextual interchanges
Please send abstracts of 500 words, accompanied by a brief bio, to tamarasilviawagner@yahoo.com.
The deadline for abstracts is 1 August 2009.