Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890

Fermanis argues that nineteenth-century settler fiction encodes complex and mobile interrelationships between settlers and migrants across the colonial southern hemisphere. By focusing on novels that depict short-term movement, this book demonstrates how such writing disrupts the idea of settlement as a stationary, permanent, or stable condition.

Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 posits that the nineteenth-century settler novel, far from being a generic and belated version of metropolitan fiction, can assist us in understanding complex, transitionary modes of settler and migrant cultural identification across and between multiple settler colonial spaces. It therefore seeks to disrupt linear understandings of Angloworld migration as a single ship voyage from Europe or America in favour of a broader heuristic grounded in the thickness of networks and interrelations, and in relations of entanglement, connection, proximity, and contiguity. The book''s focus is on two themes: first, the ways in which settler fiction encodes regional spatial imaginaries, such as Australasia, Oceania, and the trans-Tasman world; and second, representations of imagined noncommunities, marginalised or precarious political subjects, and the historically punishable bodies of Indigenous and mixed-race peoples, indentured labourers, non-European diasporas, convicts, white paupers, and those considered eugenically unfit. Moving away from curiously static understandings of settler cultural history as the reproduction of modular British institutions, this book demonstrates that settler fiction requires us to read settlerism against its professed ideology of stability, permanence, and coherence.