Abstract
Imagined Homelands presents a compelling reappraisal of nineteenth-century colonial poetry. Although poetry produced by British migrants and settlers is often excluded from both studies of colonial culture and broader accounts of Victorian poetry, Rudy makes a convincing case for its value and impact. Poetry’s portability, affective qualities and communality, Rudy argues, spoke to the collective and emotional dimensions of settler colonialism in powerful ways and ultimately ‘allowed emigrants to imagine new forms of belonging’ (p. 189). His vision of colonial poetry as a simultaneously migratory and emotionally tethering form is itself appealingly poetic. Poetry, for Rudy, became a deeply resonant mode of cultural transmission for emigrants and more established colonialists that could be ‘carried… in their hearts, their minds, and their blood’ (p. 10).
By focusing on poetry, the book makes a valuable contribution to recent endeavours to broaden our understanding of colonial cultural formations. Ever since Edward Said dubbed the novel ‘the aesthetic object’ for exploring these issues, ‘the novel has occupied center stage in calibrating nineteenth-century British engagements with the world’ (p. 13). In challenging the novel’s dominance, Rudy’s book complements work undertaken by scholars such as Fariha Sheikh in Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (2018) and within my own British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 (2016). Imagined Homelands also extends this work considerably by centring writing produced by migrants in colonial contexts, a vast field that has been surprisingly overlooked in favour of British literature and history.
The book brings together an impressive range of poems by migrants and settlers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. It also covers a wide range of subgenres and topics, including shipboard newspapers, Scottish bardic culture and the output of colonial laureates. Rudy is deft in combining his broad geographic and cultural range with generic and local specificities, but leans predominantly towards the latter mode of narrating history in order to challenge assumptions about the uniformity and reproducibility of ‘Anglo’ culture, most notably advanced by the historian James Belich in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (2009).
Imagined Homelands offers a number of other thoughtful and measured correctives to existing views of colonial culture. One of Rudy’s motivations is to defend colonial poetry from accusations of being ‘intellectually bereft and aesthetically disappointing’ (p. 4). Instead, Rudy argues, we need to re-evaluate some of the key qualities and features of these poems. To be generic, in a colonial context, was to provide the familiarity and comfort that helped migrants imagine new homelands and communities. Likewise, modes of parody, imitation and replication are not, in Rudy’s view, indications of facile derivativeness or of cultural crisis but rather offered scope for more sophisticated mediations of the relationships between metropolitan and colonial cultural heritages and identities. Furthermore, recognising the value of these modes in the colonial context, Rudy claims, might change how we think about replication and originality within poetry more broadly.
While much of the book defends the value of the poetry examined, Rudy is rightly wary of seeming to champion it. Many colonial poems are, after all, deeply troubling from the perspective of racial politics. This includes the ‘Poetry of Greater Britain’ examined in Chapter Six, which helped to consolidate perceptions of a ‘global network of Anglo-Saxons, connected through race and shared political and aesthetic values’ (p. 168). The book does not shy away from grappling with the difficulties of such poems and also acknowledges the ways in which the ‘absence of nonwhite voices’ in the poetic record speaks to histories of colonial violence (p. 13). Rudy’s focus on British colonial poetry does not allow for the scope to probe these issues fully. Like other books about colonialism which are not squarely postcolonial in outlook, Imagined Homelands thus undertakes the challenging task of finding ways to engage with the important histories of racial violence that its focal texts marginalise.
It is to Rudy’s credit that his awareness of these issues, in fact, produces some of the book’s finest moments of close analysis. Rudy’s readings of the works of the Australian writer Henry Kendall, for instance, provide a nuanced account of one poet’s attempt and failure to ‘speak or sing the Australian landscape’ (p. 116), inhibited by a residual knowledge of atrocities against Aboriginal people and his own disconnection from the landscape as a white settler. In one of Rudy’s numerous inspired connections between form and subject, the analysis informs compelling wider claims about the reasons why individuated lyric poetry was doomed to fail in the Bush while the communal ballad thrived.
Rudy’s decision to disrupt ‘traditional, canon-based disciplinary approaches’ by focusing upon the colonial poetry often excluded does come at a cost (p. 18). Many of the poems Rudy analyses will not be familiar to his readers – they are no longer part of our shared cultural heritage, despite their original function in helping contemporary readers realise theirs. The incorporation of lengthy quotations from the poetry does, however, help to address this problem. Apart from some analysis of the colonial circulation of classic texts such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ (1855), there are also few attempts to situate colonial poems in relation to more canonical material. This decision makes sense in the context of Rudy’s study but affords scope for future work to explore relationships of mutual influence and interconnection between colonial and British canonical poets in more detail.
Appropriately for a book that so often centres questions of voice, Imagined Homelands pays due attention to its own. Rudy’s writing style is more readable and flexible than that which characterises many monographs, and it occasionally moves from a formal academic register into something more imaginative and speculative. Throughout the study, Rudy’s points are seldom made in a way that feels strongly polemical or combative. Rather, they are presented as thoughtful, exploratory and judiciously corrective. The end result is a book that is frequently enjoyable, despite the challenges of taking the reader through much unfamiliar material.
Ultimately, Imagined Homelands has much to offer readers with an interest in form and affect as well as to scholars with specific interests in nineteenth-century colonial culture. The book’s exploration of the relationship between poetry and feeling in colonial contexts combines impressive academic rigour with an appealing emotional resonance of its own.