ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. As narratives of emigration and settlement critically engaged with fiction produced 'back home', at the imperial centre, and increasingly also with each other, they added a crucial aspect to imperialisms complex influence on both colonial and 'metropolitan' culture. Victorian Settler Narratives is particularly interested in the ways in which such engagements shaped literary culture. Discussing the representation of Britain's geographical antipodes, Australia and New Zealand, in particular in nineteenth-century popular culture, Janet Myers similarly highlights the Victorians' construction of 'a new form of portable domesticity that enabled British emigrants throughout the second half of the nineteenth century to envision and to create Antipodal England'. This denies not just the importance that people consider genre formation as part of a larger phenomenon, but also the significance of intertextual interchanges that were taking place at the time.
