Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration

Arguing that failure, the threat of failure, and even a curious desire to fail in the attempt to emigrate drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways, Tamara S. Wagner offers a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation. She highlights the subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as a counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service.