Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies

Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada-often disparaged as derivative and uncouth-should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work of settlement. The book illuminates cultural pressures that accompanied the unprecedented growth of British emigration across the nineteenth century. It also explores the role of poetry as a mediator between familiar British ideals and new colonial paradigms within emerging literary markets from Sydney and Melbourne to Cape Town and Halifax. Rudy focuses on the work of poets both canonical-including Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and Hemans-and relatively obscure, from Adam Lindsay Gordon, Susanna Moodie, and Thomas Pringle to Henry Kendall and Alexander McLachlan. He examines in particular the nostalgic relations between home and abroad, core and periphery, whereby British emigrants used both original compositions and canonical British works to imagine connections between their colonial experiences and the lives they left behind in Europe. Drawing on archival work from four continents, Imagined Homelands insists on a wider geographic frame for nineteenth-century British literature. From lyrics printed in newspapers aboard emigrant ships heading to Australia and South Africa, to ballads circulating in New Zealand and Canadian colonial journals, poetry was a vibrant component of emigrant life. In tracing the histories of these poems and the poets who wrote them, this book provides an alternate account of nineteenth-century British poetry and, more broadly, of settler colonial culture.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Floating Worlds 2. Colonial Authenticity 3. Sounding Colonial 4. Native Poetry 5. Colonial Laureates 6. The Poetry of Greater Britain Conclusion Appendix A Appendix B Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Jason R. Rudy is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics.

Review :
Drawing on extensive archival work on four continents, Rudy’s vibrant investigative study moves deftly among the colonial poetries of Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, with particular emphasis on the first two, and finds fascinating examples of direct copying, echoic referencing and inventive reconstruction of British verse techniques in such diverse media as shipboard newspapers, colonial anthologies, exhibition performances and individual collections. —Times Higher Education Writing with erudition and depth and in an engaging, accessible style, Rudy brings poets such as Australian Henry Kendall and Canadian Isabella Valancy Crawford, long dismissed by "commonplace assumptions about colonial derivativeness” (chapter 1), into world literature. —Choice Imagined Homelands presents a compelling reappraisal of nineteenth-century colonial poetry . . . [Rudy's] vision of colonial poetry as a simultaneously migratory and emotionally tethering form is itself appealingly poetic . . . Imagined Homelands has much to offer readers with an interest in form and affect as well as to scholars with specific interests in nineteenth-century colonial culture. The book's exploration of the relationship between poetry and feeling in colonial contexts combines impressive academic rigour with an appealing emotional resonance of its own. —Jude Piesse, Liverpool John Moores University, Literature and History