Floating Worlds: Émigré Poetry and British Culture

Abstract

Victorian emigrant ships headed to the Australian colonies carried printing presses and published newspapers on board for the entertainment of passengers; the emigrants themselves generated most of the content. Based on archival work in Australia, South Africa, and England, this essay analyzes poetry published in these ship newspapers, and shows how emigrant poems engage both nostalgically and parodically with canonic poetry of the period: works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Hood. Shipboard emigrant poems showcase the process of transition from home to abroad, British citizen to colonial subject; they offer an important view into the culture of Victorian emigration and colonialism.

Exporting ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’: Robert Burns, Scottish Romantic Nationalism and Colonial Settler Identity

“…He suggests that: rather than turning a nose up at what may look, on first glance, like paler versions of canonical British poems, more may come from thinking expansively about the contexts in which emigrants' poems were written, published, circulated and read; and about the important differences between origin and copy, before and after, British and colonial. 4 Inspired by Rudy's defense of the derivative, I propose approaching nineteenth-century Burnsiana, particularly that of diasporic Scots, with a more serious and less superior eye. And makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.…”

That Untravell'd World: The Problem of Thinking Globally in Victorian Studies

“…Other texts in this vein include studies that take aboriginal subjects as their object of inquiry – Kate Flint's The Transatlanic Indian , 1776–1930 (); Tim Fulford's Romantic Indians () – and studies that explicitly reject terracentrism altogether by exploring literary geographies sketched out upon water. Jason Rudy's recent work, for instance, has recovered the poetic activity of British settlers en route to Australia.…”