ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses literary developments in Britain’s colonial settlements. Comprising Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, the nineteenth-century English-speaking colonial settler world participated in transoceanic exchanges of cultural, including literary, products. After providing a brief overview, the chapter identifies two insightful developments that allow us to unpack these connections and their impact on colonial self-representation: domestic settler fiction (with its focus on claiming domesticity for settler spaces) and the transoceanic circulation of sensation fiction. These diametrically opposed developments exemplify how the adaptation of imported genres expressed a search for settler identity, while incidents in colonial settlements—such as the transoceanic sensationalization of the so-called Tichborne Claimant—featured in both British-authored and settler writing, transforming attitudes toward settlements at the imperial center. A reconsideration of the diverse popular culture productions of the settler colonies lets us track the two-way exchanges between center and periphery that shaped writing about and in the settlements.
