Introduction: southern worlds, globes, and spheres – Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis

I World/Globe
1 Making, mapping, and unmaking worlds: globes, panoramas, fictions, and oceans – Peter Otto
2 Southern doubles: antipodean life as a comparative exercise – Sarah Comyn
3 Lag fever, flash men, and late fashionable worlds – Clara Tuite
4 Spatial synchronicities: settler emigration, the voyage out, and shipboard literary production – Fariha Shaikh
5 Augustus Earle’s pedestrian tour in New Zealand: or, get off the beach – Ingrid Horrocks
6 Australia to Paraguay: race, class, and poetry in a South American colony – Jason Rudy, Aaron Bartlett, Lindsey O’Neil, and Justin Thompson

II Acculturation/Transculturation
7 ‘The renowned Crusoe in the native costume of our adopted country’: reading Robinson Crusoe in colonial New Zealand – Jane Stafford
8 The transnational kangaroo hunt – Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver
9 ‘Then came the high unpromising forests, and miles of loneliness’: Louisa Atkinson’s recasting of the Australian landscape – Grace Moore
10 Mapping the way forward: Thomas Baines on expedition to the coronation of Cetshwayo kaMpande, Zululand, 1873 – Lindy Stiebel
11 ‘Wild, desert and lawless countries’: William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa – Matthew Shum
12 Short stories of the southern seas: the island as collective in the works of Louis Becke – Jennifer Fuller

III Indigenous/Diasporic
13 ‘That’s white fellow’s talk you know, missis’: wordlists, songs, and knowledge production on the colonial Australian frontier – Anna Johnston
14 Kiro’s thoughts about England: an unexpected text in an unexpected place – Michelle Elleray
15 Mokena and Macaulay: cultural geographies of poetry in colonial Aotearoa – Nikki Hessell
16 Vigilance: petitions, politics, and the African Christian converts of the nineteenth century – Hlonipha Mokoena
17 Reading indigeneity in nineteenth-century British Guiana – Manu Samriti Chander
18 ‘Some Genuine Chinese Authors’: literary appreciation, comparatism, and universalism in the Straits Chinese Magazine – Porscha Fermanis

The south in the world – Elleke Boehmer

Index

This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by proposing a new literary history of the region that is predicated less on metropolitan turning points and more on southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin.

With a focus on south–south interactions, southern audiences, and southern modes of addressivity, Worlding the south foregrounds marginal, minor, and neglected writers and texts across a hemispheric complex of southern oceans and terrains. Adopting an ontological tradition that tests the dominance of networked theories of globalisation, the collection asks how we can better understand the dialectical relationship between the ‘real’ world in which a literary text or art object exists and the symbolic or conceptual world it shows or creates. By examining the literary processes of worlding, it demonstrates how art objects make legible homogenising imperial and colonial narratives, inequalities of linguistic power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance.

With contributions from leading scholars in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, the collection revises literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, and south–south perspectives.