Open Collections

Anderson, Delaney

University of British Columbia

In this thesis, I argue that Scottish author John Galt’s (1779-1839) short fiction pertaining to colonial issues is ambivalent enough to provide interpretive room for newspaper editors to reprint his work to serve their own ideological purposes, whether to uphold the status quo of colonial governance, or in revolutionary ways to push back against colonial powers. Framing these editorial actions as either strategies or tactics (as defined by Michel de Certeau), I demonstrate how Galt’s short fiction is mobilized in two opposing ways in two British colonial newspapers from the early 1830s. The first chapter concerns two issues of The Kingston Chronicle, each printed in Upper Canada in 1830. I argue that Galt’s short fiction is reprinted and incorporated into this Upper Canadian newspaper in a strategic way that solidifies the status quo position of the power-holding Tories in Kingston. In the second chapter, I pivot to an 1832 issue of Kingston, Jamaica’s first anti-slavery paper The Jamaica Watchman. I reveal how the political ambiguities in Galt’s short story “The Confession” enable The Watchman’s editors to reprint it as a subversive tactic in an abolitionist context. To substantiate these claims about how nineteenth-century newspaper editors and their readers may have engaged with Galt’s stories in the context of local, colonial newspapers, I draw on Meredith McGill’s scholarship on reprinting, as well as Alison Hedley’s invocation of Michel de Certeau’s strategies and tactics to analyze nineteenth-century periodicals. These two chapters reveal the vastly different ways in which Galt’s short fiction was reprinted in the British colonies and provide evidence for the scholarly value of studying reprints of British fiction from newspapers around its nineteenth-century empire.

Text

2024-08-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89100

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/