英文摘要 |
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. |