Through examining the common themes in the writings of five anarchist women writers, I argue their writings are representative of ideological regionalism, or the convergence of factors that give rise to a political ideology that is then expounded through the literary production of a particular time and place. I analyze the economic, sexual, and “religious” politics across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, connecting arguments about class, individualism, feminism, and anarchism to a foundation of Midwestern cultural ideology. Ultimately, I argue that economic, political, and historical conditions promulgated an exceptionalist American anarchism rooted in settler anti-statism. <br>

During the nineteenth century an unprecedented number of emigrants left Britain, primarily for America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Recent historical scholarship has argued that these predominantly Victorian mass migrations belong to an even larger history of “Anglo” migration, characterized by its global reach and ideological investment in settlement. Situating my approach in relation to this wider framework, this thesis argues that Victorian periodicals played a key and overlooked role in both imagining and mediating the dramatic phenomenon of mass British settler emigration. As I argue in chapter 1, this is both owing to close historical and material links between settler emigration and the periodical press, and to the periodical’s deeper running capacities to register and moderate forms of modern motion. While most novels do little to engage with emigration, turning to periodicals brings to light a large range of distinct settler emigration texts and genres which typically work with cohesive spatio-temporal models to offset the destabilizing potentiality of emigrant mobility. Moreover, many now canonical texts originally published in periodicals can be situated alongside them; presenting opportunities to produce fresh readings of works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and others which I incorporate throughout. My first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres which circulated across a range of mainstream, predominantly middle-class periodicals: texts about emigrant voyages, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about colonial settlement. I argue that these texts are cohesive and reassuring, and thus of a different character to the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of my thesis aims to capitalize on the diversity and range which is a key feature of Victorian periodicals by turning to settler emigration texts that embody a feminized or radical perspective, and which often draw upon mainstream representations in order to challenge their dominant formations.

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"Image and Text" focuses on the consequences of multi-media interaction on the concept of a work's meaning(s) in three distinct publishing trends in nineteenth-century Britain: graphic satire, the literary annuals, and book illustration. The graphic satire of engravers James Gillray and George Cruikshank is replete with textual components that rely on the interaction of media for the overall satirical impact. Literary annuals combine engravings with the ekphrastic poetry of writers including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Book illustrations provided writers Sir Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson a means to recycle previously published works as "new" texts; the engravings promote an illusion of textual originality and reality by imparting visual meanings onto the text. In turn, the close proximity of text to image changes visual meanings by making the images susceptible to textual meanings. Many of the theoretical implications resulting from the pairing of media resound in modern film adaptations, which often provide commentary about nineteenth-century visual culture and the self-reflexivity of media. The critical heritage that has responded to the pairing of media in nineteenth-century print culture often expresses uneasiness with the relationship between text and mechanically produced images, and this uneasiness has often resulted in the treatment of text and image as separate components of multi-media works. "Image and Text" recovers the dialogue between media in nineteenth-century print forms often overlooked in critical commentary that favors the study of an elusive and sometimes fictional concept of an original work; each chapter acknowledges the collaborative nature of the production of multi-media works and their ability to promote textual newness, originality (or the illusion of originality), and (un)reality. Multi-media works challenge critical conventions regarding artistic and authorial originality, and they enter into battles over fidelity of meaning. By recognizing multi-media works as part of a diverse genre it becomes possible to expand critical dialogue about such works past fidelity studies. Text and image cannot faithfully represent the other; what they can do is engage in dialogue: with each other, with their historical and cultural moments, and with their successors and predecessors.