Arcady In Australia: The Evocation Of Australia In Nineteenth-Century English Literature

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In the nineteenth century, Australia existed in the British imagination as something far more potent than a distant colonial outpost — it was Arcady, a mythologised pastoral paradise projected onto the vast, unknown antipodean continent. Coral Lansbury's landmark study chronicles how English novelists, poets, and writers of the Victorian era constructed and perpetuated a romanticised vision of Australia, one shaped more by literary convention and social longing than by geographic reality. Drawing on a rich array of primary texts, the work details how the promise of Australian land became a vehicle for escapist fantasy, utopian dreaming, and the resolution of social anxieties that plagued industrial Britain. Lansbury argues with scholarly precision that this imaginative geography was not merely decorative but deeply ideological, revealing the tensions between class aspiration, imperial ambition, and pastoral nostalgia at the heart of nineteenth-century English culture. Her analysis illuminates the intersection of literature and empire, demonstrating how fictional representations of Australia shaped — and were shaped by — the lived experiences of emigration and colonial settlement. A foundational text in both Australian literary history and postcolonial studies, this work leaves the reader questioning where myth ends and the making of a nation begins.