Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930

Edmundson, Melissa

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76917-2

Cited by 16 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…This uneasiness is also captured in genres such as colonial sensation and gothic novels, which unsettle the tropes of adventure and settlement by representing the "violent processes of colonization" in uncanny, antipodal, and inverted southern spaces (Gelder, 2014: 191; see also Brantlinger, 2003). While the colonial gothic, like the captivity narrative, is an important generic development in North American and other colonial contexts (Edmundson, 2018), studies of the southern colonial gothic suggest that it is marked by peculiarly antipodean inversions and by the pathological instability of a type of settlement where "death is a matter of banal routine", including heightened forms of frontier violence towards Indigenous peoples and women (Conrich, 2012: 394;Edmundson, 2018;Gelder, 2012: 383). Novels, novellas, serialized fiction, and short stories from across the southern colonies, such as Marcus Clarke's The Mystery of Major Molinuex (1881), Margaret Bullock's Uta: A Story of Love, Hate and Revenge (1894), and Percy Fitzpatrick's The Outspan: Takes of South Africa (1897), all represent the haunting pathology and trauma of colonialism in its most uncanny and violent forms.…”

Section: Towards a Southern Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

Comyn

Fermanis

2021

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

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Section: Towards a Southern Archivementioning

confidence: 99%