Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Life Writing, and the Victorian Nomad

Jean Fernandez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040808313
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Life Writing, and the Victorian Nomad employs canonical literary texts, and introduces new noncanonical works of fiction and autobiography, to uncover how nineteenth-century fiction and life writing engaged with the figure of the nomad as a problematic phenomenon during the Victorian age. Exploring constructions of the nomad in legal, ethnological, and imperial discourse, this volume examines how literary texts responded to nomadism in national and imperial contexts when global flows of population necessitated by empire operated in tension with policies of sedentarization pursued by the nation and the colonial state. This book reveals how literary texts explored and interrogated the sedentary-nomad binary with implications for genre, reader relations, and the ideological underpinnings of sedentism. It examines works by Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Thomson, Flora Annie Steel, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a Romani autobiography by Samson Loveridge, and will be of strong interest to scholars of Victorian literature and empire studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “Drear flight and homeless wandering”: The great house, spectral nomadism, and the nomadic subject in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847)
• 3 “No better than a vagabond upon this earth”: Mobile bodies and mobile economies in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848)
• 4 “Wandering off in search of Lord knows what, Lord knows where”: Nomadism and the strange family story in William Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868)
• 5 Finding the nomadic voice: Life writing and the problematic production of nomadic subjectivity in No. 747 being the autobiography of a Gypsy (1890)
• 6 Nomads, empire, and colonial modernity: Joseph Thomson’s Ulu: An African Romance (1888), Flora Annie Steel’s “Habitual Criminals” (1894), and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge Builders” (1893)
• Bibliography
• Index