Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies

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