environments | ecologies | climates
Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: Recent Climate Fiction in Australia and New Zealand
Handbook on Literature and Migration, ed. Charlotte Sussman and Corina Stan (Palgrave, 2023)
Handbook on Literature and Migration, ed. Charlotte Sussman and Corina Stan (Palgrave, 2023)
"This chapter argues that even as the novel provides one of the key cultural mechanisms for imagining climate-induced migration to Australia and New Zealand, its future-looking narratives remain tethered to formal approaches that were developed as means of comprehending migration to the settler colonies in the nineteenth century."
The Culture of Erosion: Settler Colonialism, Geological Agency, and New Zealand Literature, 1930s-50s
Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2023)
Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2023)
"Yet what emerges from the archive of mid-twentieth century settler writing in New Zealand is a strikingly literal, visible sense of the Anthropocene. This is because the geological agency of settlement was plainly evident in the nation’s eroding hillsides and flooding rivers. ... However, writers such as Bethell and Guthrie-Smith demonstrate that it was possible to think outside such terms. They drew on different aesthetic and cultural perspectives to offer a more radical questioning of the choices and values that created and sustained the culture of erosion."
The Climates of the Victorian Novel: Seasons, Weather, and Regional Fiction in Britain and Australia
PMLA (2021)
Winner of the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies (2021), North American Victorian Studies Association
PMLA (2021)
Winner of the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies (2021), North American Victorian Studies Association
"The climatic underpinnings of Victorian literature can be glimpsed through the contrasting forms taken by the regional novel in a canonical British example of the genre and in a less familiar example from Australia.... [T]he Victorian settler empire provides an arena where the nineteenth-century novel can be seen engaging directly with some of the most pressing environmental concerns and compromises of our own moment."
Colonial Ecologies: Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira and Writing the Settled Environment
A History of New Zealand Literature, ed. Mark Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
A History of New Zealand Literature, ed. Mark Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
"[D]riven by the economic imperatives of the forestry industry as well as by the expansion of pastoral production, its environmental history until the mid-twentieth century is one of widespread destruction and radical transformation. It was on this violently modified and ever more industrialised terrain that New Zealand literature took its increasingly distinctive shape."
SETTLER COLONIALISM | EMPIRE | MIGRATION
On Systematic Colonization and the Culture of Settler Colonialism: Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (1829)
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History
BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History
"In its wide-reaching political and cultural impacts, Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney constitutes the entry point to what might be called, after Lauren Goodlad, a Victorian settler-colonial “geopolitical unconscious.” A Letter from Sydney and the project of systematic colonization illuminates the deep urge of the Victorians to remake the world in their own image, as well as the global exchanges and imaginaries that helped shape the culture of metropolitan Britain."
Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism
Victorian Studies (2016)
Victorian Studies (2016)
"Operating alongside and in conjunction with vast movements of the population and transfers of capital, Greater Britain’s textual dimension is characterized by the formal complexities that arise from the clash of metropolitan and colonial concerns across discontinuous imperial spaces."
The Romance of Uneven Development: Geography, Capitalism, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Globalized Pacific
Victorian Literature and Culture (2015)
Victorian Literature and Culture (2015)
"These novels represent a concerted attempt to describe the workings of an emerging form of imperial expansion driven more by multinational forms of financial speculation than national political interests."