Literature in a Time of Migration rethinks British fiction in the light of new practices of human mobility that reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, it confronts the paradox that at a time at which transnational human movement occurred globally, on a scale before unknown, British fiction appears to turn inward to tell stories of local places, in which stability and rootedness are rewarded. On the contrary, Literature in a Time of Migration reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement. Works by canonical writers (Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and George Eliot), and other popular contemporaries (Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, and Thomas Martin Wheeler), examine issues that overlap with an agenda set in public discussions of colonial emigration, which they also helped to shape. Debates concerning, for example, assisted emigration, ‘forced’ and ‘free’ migration, colonization, settlement, and the removal of native peoples, figure in complex ways in fictions. Read alongside writings by emigration theorists, practitioners, and enthusiasts, fictional texts reveal a sustained engagement with British migratory practices and their worldwide consequences. Literature in a Time of Migration is a timely reminder of the place and importance of migration within British cultural heritage.
