Domestic Fiction In Colonial Australia And New Zealand

Colonial domestic literature has been largely overlooked and is due for a reassessment. This essay collection explores attitudes to colonialism, imperialism and race, as well as important developments in girlhood and the concept of the New Woman.

Colonial domestic literature has been largely overlooked and is due for a reassessment. This essay collection explores attitudes to colonialism, imperialism and race, as well as important developments in girlhood and the concept of the New Woman.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

Veiled Honour tells the story of women forced into loveless marriage, and their conflict between family duty and their desire for freedom, love, and education. It echoes with the gossip of women caught between traditions of arranged marriage and romantic alternatives offered by pulp fiction and Bollywood. The men are victims of their own private illusions of wealth and status. A battle of the sexes takes place within fortunes and frustrations of intersecting families. Set in Fiji in a post-colonial era, and partly in Australia, the characters' lives are affected by foreign contacts and changes happening within society. The book is rich in social history, with a movement of people of diverse cultures on a tropical island, a colourful and 'idyllic paradise.' Satya Colpani poignantly reveals through dialogue and humour, the way the lives of Indo-Fijian women are largely determined by their situation in a particular time and place.

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950 explores a range of real and fictional colonial girlhood experiences from Jamaica, Mauritius, South Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada to reflect on the transitional state of girlhood between childhood and adulthood.

Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were female figures in late nineteenth century domestic novels. This study disrupts the canonical account of a non-gendered, linear progress toward modern Korean selfhood and examines translation's impact on Korea's construction of modern gender roles.

From Colonial to Modern examines representations of girls in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand girls' literature to trace how colonial authors transformed British feminine norms to produce transnational ideals and modern, nationalised femininities.