Janet Myers, Associate Professor of English, recently published Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination in the Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century series at SUNY Press.
Myers’ book explores representations of middle-class emigration from Britain to Australia in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how emigrants transplanted a range of material and ideological practices associated with English domesticity.
Through chapters that pair Victorian novels with visual art and non-fictional sources such as letters, memoirs, and emigrant guides, Antipodal England delineates how such “portable domesticity” enabled nineteenth-century British emigrants to see themselves and their culture as capable of preservation and even re-invention despite the enormous geographical and cultural shift across continents that Australian emigration entailed.