The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes [Hardcover]

This study treats the Victorian Antipodes as a compelling site of romance and satire for middle-class writers who went to New Zealand between 1840 and 1872. Blythe's research fits with the rising study of settler colonialism and highlights the intersection of late-Victorian ideas and post-colonial theories.Introduction: The Meridian of the Antipodes: A Shadowy Resting Place for the Imagination 1. A Victorian Sublunary Heaven: Emigration and Tom Arnold's 'Antipodistic' Romance 2. 'Looking Yonderly': Mary Taylor's Miss Miles: or, A Tale of Yorkshire Life (1890) 3. Antipodal Effervescence: Robert Browning, Alfred Domett, and Ranolf and Amohia: A South-Sea Day Drea m (1872) 4. Crossings or the Swinging Door: Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Or Over the Range (1872) 5. Barbarous Benevolence: Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882) and Australia and New Zeal and (1873) Afterward: Shadows a Moving Man Cannot Catch

Butler's Erewhon is the best known of the New Zealand utopias, an upside down world where illness was a crime, and crime a malady. Utopias were the hinges between this world and another where everything that was not known here was usual there, and Helen Lucy Blythe introduces us to the full range of imagined possibilities offered by New Zealand to its British visitors and settlers. This is a book equally valuable for students of fantastic commonwealths and of the cultural history of Aotearoa/New Zealand. - Jonathan Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, USA

Ranging from Robert Southey, Tom Arnold, and Arthur Hugh Clough to Alfred Dommett, Samuel Butler, and Anthony Trollope, Helen Lucy Blythe's The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes offers an excellent analysis of the Victorians' response to the topsy-turvy paradise of colonial New Zealand. It adds an important dimension to our understanding of the issues of emigration and colonization. - Patrick Brantlinger, James Rudy Professor Emeritus, Inls)