Romancing Settlement in the Anglo-Globe: Material Culture in Clara Morison and Middlemarch
Resource
NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 36, 037-070
NTU Studies in Language and Literature, 36, 037-070
Journal
NTU Studies in Language and Literature
Journal Issue
36
Pages
037-070
Date Issued
2016-12
Date
2016-12
Author(s)
Li, C.S.
Abstract
In the British settlement world, fiction participated in the settlement networks
across vast colonial divides. This study explores resonances of the settlement imaginary in two female writers’ novels, Clara Morison and Middlemarch, by situating them in a globalized context of British settlement colonization.2 In so doing, this paper seeks to contribute to the study of Victorian realism in a globalized context,
focusing on how the two female writers enlarged the scope of domesticity into the size of a community. Lying at the core of the settlement imaginary, embodied differently
in both novels, is a loosely shared mythologized material culture of settlement, in which the fantasy of the primal land, the mythology of cottages, and a guarded reaction to material abundance orchestrate a vision of a classless community. The
reading of Clara Morison aims to show the evidence of the writer Catherine Helen
Spence’s unwavering belief in the promise of a newly established settlement community. The reading of Middlemarch shows how the settlement imaginary helps the reader understand how the provincial ideal in Middlemarch resonates with settlement colonization. As the plot of the novel is set in the 1820s and 30s, it captures the tantalizing
fantasy of settlement colonization of that time; by imagining emigration as the
possibility of creating provincial communities that may or may not exist in the British Isles, it sustains the reader’s longing for a remedy of social problems.
Subjects
凱薩琳‧海倫‧史賓塞
《克拉摩里森》
喬治‧艾略特
全球化
《米德爾馬契》（另譯為《米德鎮的春天》）
移居型殖民
移居想像
Catherine Helen Spence
Clara Morison
George Eliot
globalization
Middlemarch
settlement colonization
the settlement imaginary
SDGs
Type
journal article