Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies by Jason R. Rudy (review)

Sailing out on a ship from England to Australia in the nineteenth century was at once an act of promise and of risk, a gesture toward a desire for self-improvement and self-sabotage, and a wild act of trust in the imperial narrative. Take for instance, an example from Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies by Jason R. Rudy, the book in question here: the case of Fidelia Hill, the first woman to publish a volume of poetry in Australia. When Hill and her husband arrived in Adelaide in December 1836, they found a town that was yet to be built, or even planned (153). However, the Adelaide that had been "sold" to the public by the British Parliament was a city with bustling streets, and a free market economy in which everyone had an equal opportunity to become wealthy (154). This was also the Adelaide that Hill and her husband had sailed to but not landed in. Hill's early poetry, composed in this Adelaide conjured by the imperial narrative to incentivize emigrants, is expressive of the emigrant hope for the realization of this promised land. Poetry, that literary form that was "everywhere" in the nineteenth century, becomes key here to the expression of emigrant experiences of hope, of optimism, of guilt, of failure, of possession, and also of dispossession—experiences that are often left out of the imperial narrative of settler-colonialism (2). In Imagined Homelands, Jason R. Rudy seeks to challenge the coherence of imperial history by turning to the hitherto neglected and significant archives of anglophone colonial poetry from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. He examines how these archives reshape "our understanding of the period, its history, and colonialism more broadly" (4). Any such understanding in the case of settler-colonialism must be linked intimately with an "accounting of homes and homelands that does not immediately take nationalistic forms" (5).

Rudy recognizes the key role that poetry played in the imaginative labour of creating new homes in foreign lands, showing "poetic genre to be a powerful mechanism supporting the cultural work of British colonialism" (6). The first two chapters of this book are concerned with the charges of derivativeness levelled against colonial poetry. Here, Rudy compellingly argues for "the foundational place of imitation in British colonial poetics" (42). Using the methodology of "historical poetics," which sees "the meaning of any poem" as "contingent and malleable," Rudy seeks to examine the value of derivativeness in poetry and in emigrant cultural formation of the nineteenth century (7). Mimicking the process that emigrants underwent in travelling to the colonies, the book opens with poetry written on ships and caught "between continents and between cultures" (21). Shipboard poetry was imitative in nature—parodies of well-known Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Longfellow that captured the nostalgia for the home left behind or anticipated a new culture in a place that was long believed to be unconducive to poetry. This poetry was then reflective of the emigrant experience of inhabiting a space of in-betweenness, of striving to create homes that were at once like the home left behind as well as a new beginning in a new place.

Long dismissed by contemporary writers (such as Oscar Wilde) and reviewers as forgeries, colonial poetic imitations, Rudy claims, are valuable not in spite of but rather because of their derivativeness. Rudy does his most powerful work in interrogating the meanings of replication, derivativeness, and plagiarism in this new context, arguing that "we need a new set of strategies for considering early colonial literary derivatives and reprinting, strategies that move beyond the simply dismissive" (45). He argues for three models of derivativeness here—"unattributed reproduction," "sentimental imitation," and "critical revising" (73). However, instead of seeing them as "stages of development" of colonial poetry, as is commonly the case, he presents them as "overlapping strategies" for feeling and experiencing new homes. To dismiss them as a symptom of a...