Jason R. Rudy

This study analyzes nineteenth-century British poetry written and published in colonial spaces: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. Both an examination of British settler culture and an effort to expand the bounds of what we consider British poetry, this project reads poems generally unknown to literary or historical scholarship. That colonial poetry has for the most part failed to make its way into modern anthologies of British literature has, first, skewed our understanding of the larger constellation of Victorian poetry and, second, kept from our attention an archive of materials that help make better sense of nineteenth-century emigrant and colonial experiences, including the eventual emergence of new national identities in colonial spaces.