The Global Cottage: English Forms in a World of Difference, 1800-1860

This dissertation examines how literary genre functioned as a technology of containment and racial regulation during the expansion of the British Empire. It argues that aesthetic modes such as the pastoral, the idyll, and the picturesque did not merely reflect national sentiment or nostalgic longing but actively produced visions of Englishness that could be exported, domesticated, and installed across colonized spaces. Focusing on both fictional and nonfictional works by women—including Elizabeth Hamilton's The Cottagers of Glenburnie, anonymously authored The Woman of Colour, Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary's A Plea for Emigration—the project traces how literary genre helped to stabilize domestic ideals, encode imperial ideologies of improvement, and manage the visual and narrative representation of difference. At the center of this history is the image of the cottage and garden: a structure both material and metaphoric that came to represent order, virtue, and national belonging even as it was transposed into radically unfamiliar environments. What unites the women in this dissertation is not a common identity or trajectory, but their relation to the periphery—to the edges of empire, to the margins of genre, to the limits of home. From Olivia Fairfield's estrangement to Susanna Moodie's affective projects and Mary Ann Shadd Cary's assertive print presence—each writer stages a contest with inherited narrative forms. Drawing on postcolonial theory, print culture studies, and visual aesthetics, what emerges across these case studies is not a unified tradition, but a shared iconoclasm, a minor-key resistance to the expectations that character and genre, nation and race, domesticity and belonging will ever neatly align. In a moment still shaped by nationalist nostalgia, aesthetic whitewashing, and the lure of "green and pleasant" land, the stakes of this work feel ongoing. To study genre as a technology of social regulation—and to watch it fray at the hands of minor, often eccentric, figures—is to glimpse the imaginative labor required to inhabit the world otherwise. These writers do not offer solutions so much as they model alternatives: makeshift grammars for thinking about home, land, and belonging when dominant idioms fall short. In attending to their refusals and improvisations, The Global Cottage proposes that literary form is not simply a vehicle for empire's values, but a site of negotiation—a space where the uneven work of world-building is not only visible but thinkable.