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theses

This dissertation examines how the eighteenth-century British travel narrative can have a genre-like coherence while at the same time consisting of great formal variation. A mode of narration that was immensely popular due to Britain’s maritime exploration of the world, it generated a wide range of representations, making it difficult to identify a common set of formal conventions. I address this problem by focusing on narrative epistemology, a defining characteristic of the travel narrative, so that I can disclose a range of distinct subgenres that bear a generic family resemblance. Using actual and virtual travel narratives to China as my samples, I examine in each chapter a different subgenre and its formal approach to telling the “truth,” whether that be based in historical factuality or constructed imaginatively. Chapter One explores the actual scientific expedition the British partook in during the Macartney Embassy. Using the detached third-person narrator to compile the embassy members’ accounts, George Staunton conducts a narrative form of quantitative experimentation to produce an empirically objective account of Chinese culture. In Chapter Two, I discuss the explicitly speculative or imaginative conjectures John Barrow makes based on the empirical information he has collected during the Macartney mission to generate a probable account of China and its place in a universal history of human civilization. Chapter Three investigates Daniel Defoe’s imaginary voyage, in which he overlays England with the virtual world of China to satirize the English government. In order to promote his political project, Defoe mildly parodies the “strange, therefore true” trope to give material form to intangible concepts such as state polity. Chapter Four examines Thomas Percy’s use of a Chinese novel that relates its male protagonist’s virtual journey. Through his interruptive footnotes, Percy contributes to the novel’s aesthetic distance from the senses so as to encourage a critical comparison between the reader and the heroine, whom Percy sees as representing Chinese society. I argue that these subgenres, by embracing the utility of imaginative virtuality to different degrees in their self-conscious attempts to narrate the “truth” about China (and England), constitute a coherent genre despite their apparent formal disparities.

ETD_5379

doi:10.7282/T33J3B8D

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Ja Yun Choi

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.