The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes

This study treats the Victorian Antipodes as a compelling site of romance and satire for middle-class writers who went to New Zealand between 1840 and 1872. Blythe's research fits with the rising study of settler colonialism and highlights the intersection of late-Victorian ideas and post-colonial theories.

"Butler's Erewhon is the best known of the New Zealand utopias, an upside down world where illness was a crime, and crime a malady. Utopias were the hinges between this world and another where everything that was not known here was usual there, and Helen Lucy Blythe introduces us to the full range of imagined possibilities offered by New Zealand to its British visitors and settlers. This is a book equally valuable for students of fantastic commonwealths and of the cultural history of Aotearoa/New Zealand." - Jonathan Lamb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, USA

"Ranging from Robert Southey, Tom Arnold, and Arthur Hugh Clough to Alfred Dommett, Samuel Butler, and Anthony Trollope, Helen Lucy Blythe's The Victorian Colonial Romance with the Antipodes offers an excellent analysis of the Victorians' response to the topsy-turvy paradise of colonial New Zealand. It adds an important dimension to our understanding of the issues of emigration and colonization." - Patrick Brantlinger, James Rudy Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, USA

"Helen Lucy Blythe writes very compellingly about the Victorians' colonial romance with the Antipodes. This rich study deals with distance, space, and fantasy - as well as with the hard material facts of settler life on the other side of the world - and makes a major intervention in conceptualizing and theorizing how national identity is transported, transformed, and made anew. Combining close textual analysis with a wealth of unfamiliar sources, it's a terrific read." - Kate Flint, Provost Professor of English and Art History, University of Southern California, USA

Helen Lucy Blythe is Professor and Chair of the Department of English & Philosophy at New Mexico Highlands University, USA.