Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Life Writing, and the Victorian Nomad

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Life Writing, and the Victorian Nomad employs canonical literary texts, and introduces new noncanonical works of fiction and autobiography, to uncover how nineteenth-century fiction and life writing engaged with the figure of the nomad as a problematic phenomenon during the Victorian age. Exploring constructions of the nomad in legal, ethnological, and imperial discourse, this volume examines how literary texts responded to nomadism in national and imperial contexts when global flows of population necessitated by empire operated in tension with policies of sedentarization pursued by the nation and the colonial state. This book reveals how literary texts explored and interrogated the sedentary-nomad binary with implications for genre, reader relations, and the ideological underpinnings of sedentism. It examines works by Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Thomson, Flora Annie Steel, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a Romani autobiography by Samson Loveridge, and will be of strong interest to scholars of Victorian literature and empire studies.

Jean Fernandez is Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, where she was a Seashore Dissertation Fellow. She is the author of Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy (Routledge 2009) and Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire: The Poetics of Imperial Space (Routledge, 2020). Her essays on Victorian fiction, Gender Studies, and Empire Studies have appeared in leading scholarly journals of nineteenth-century British literature.