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Kenton Storey. Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016. Pp. 298. $65 (cloth).

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acts of “unauthorized poetic reproduction [that were] foundational to colonial culture” (46). Chapter 3 discusses global Scottish migration and the ways in which the creation of a fabricated “Scottish dialect,”… Click to show full abstract

acts of “unauthorized poetic reproduction [that were] foundational to colonial culture” (46). Chapter 3 discusses global Scottish migration and the ways in which the creation of a fabricated “Scottish dialect,” rendered in songs and ballads that imitated the work of Robert Burns, could simultaneously mark a “general sense of Scottish culture” (77) abroad while also revealing “a more heterogeneous ‘neo-British’ colonial space” than historians of the British Empire have usually depicted (79). “Dialect in these nineteenth-century colonial spaces was itself generic in its function as shared, recognizable, and portable,” Rudy argues (78), and, in this way, poems written in Scottish dialect had a greater community-making power in the colonies than in Scotland itself. The last three chapters consider the experiences of secondand third-generation colonial poets, who sought more concertedly to craft “native” literatures that belonged within and to particular settler locations. These efforts included attempts by some second-generation poets to shift from the first-person plural subject that had characterized earlier colonial verse, to a first-person singular form that could meditate on the relationship between the “native” poet, the colonial landscape, and the other kinds of “natives” who occupied it. Or they included the labors of “colonial laureates”—authors such as Richard Hengist Horne, Susanna Moodie, and Charles Sangster—who were tasked with the work of “maintaining ceremony in far-flung colonial spaces” and “training settler colonialists to see foreign spaces as extensions of Great Britain” (135). Finally, at the end of the century, poets such as the Bulletin School in Australia and the Confederation Poets in Canada came to deploy a language of race—the “Anglo-Saxon” spirit of a global “Greater Britain”—to stabilize the ideal of a shared, collective, coherent culture, which the burgeoning nationalist movements around the Empire were increasingly disrupting. Imagined Homelands is therefore a book about the settlers’ experiences of colonialism as mediated through their poems and their concurrent constructions of global “English.” Rudy writes in the introduction that “to view colonialism from the perspective of poetry requires understanding that poems have histories and also that the meanings of poems change as they circulate through different communities and across time” (6). It is worth considering, as Rudy does, what counts as a community, who is allowed to belong to a community, and whose poems can circulate through the communal spaces that colonialism opened for some but also narrowed for others. While discoveries of work by native poets continue to complicate the story of nineteenth-century US poetry, few equivalents have yet been located in the archives of British settler colonialism that Rudy examines. The late emergence of race as a salient concept at the end of Imagined Homelands thus raises different kinds of questions. To what extent were the aesthetic categories that this book tracks—imitation, parody, genre—as well as a term like poetry itself—racialized from the very beginning? Can the inclusion of colonial poetries within the story of Victorian poetry enable scholars to reconsider how other kinds of exclusionary practices structured the formation of their canon? In addition to all its other contributions, Rudy’s book gives Victorianists an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the history of poetics and the formation of whiteness.

Keywords: colonial; colonialism; kenton storey; poetry; press; settler

Journal Title: Journal of British Studies
Year Published: 2019

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