Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-232) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: the meridian of the Antipodes: a shadowy resting place for the imagination -- A Victorian sublunary heaven: emigration and Tom Arnold's "antipodistic" romance -- "Looking yonderly": Mary Taylor's Miss Miles: or, a tale of Yorkshire life -- Antipodal effervescence: Robert Browning, Alfred Domett, and Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea day dream -- Crossings or the swinging door: Samuel Butlers Erewhon or over the range -- Barbarous benevolence: Anthony Trollope's The fixed period (1882) and Australia and New Zealand.
Summary:
"The study treats the Victorian Antipodes as a compelling, fantastical, and utopian site of romance and subsequent satire for five middle-class writers who went to New Zealand between 1840 and 1872. Examining their dreams and experiences and the writing produced from their travels, chapters illuminate how contact with England's opposite and mirror produced literary studies of motion, distance, inversion, primitivism, and travels in time and space, foregrounding the empire's instrumental shaping of literary form, challenging realism with romance and gesturing towards science fiction and modernism. It affirms the distinctness of colonial settlements central to the rising specialism of settler colonialism, and highlights the intersection of late-Victorian ideas and post-colonial theories often kept separate in criticism"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.