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theses

This dissertation constructs a new literary history of the British Empire by showing how geography underpins novelistic form in the long nineteenth century. “Outer Spaces” claims that the nineteenth-century British provincial novel’s representations of distantly administered rural geographies create the formal foundations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empire fiction’s conceptualizations of colonial space. While work on empire has grown increasingly mainstream in Victorian studies, it still too often conceives of the literature of imperialism as separate from the field’s domestic core. My project challenges this division. In doing so, it reveals that the geographic form of novelistic narrative ties together the outlying precincts of both metropole and periphery. Engaging with the rich critical traditions that view novelistic form as conditioned by geography as well as history, my project raises the visibility of obscured, outlying spaces in a traditional corpus and ties them together by revealing how the domestic roots of British imperialism condition the very literary structures through which the Victorians would come to know the empire. In charting a new literary history of British imperialism from the decades preceding the Victorian age through to modernism, I divide my project into two parts, following a cultural shift through the project’s corpus from direct administrative control (Part I) to ecological transformation and resource extraction (Part II) as the primary mode of overseeing marginalized spaces and their populations. In addition to complicating extant histories of New Imperialism and Britain’s “Scramble for Africa,” I argue that sovereignty and the environment are inextricably linked in the literary history of the British Empire’s territorial frontiers. As I develop this claim across the project, I concurrently trace how the geographic structuring of the novel in these outlying spaces conditions the possibilities for colonial discourse. As the project moves to the threshold of the postcolonial era, I demonstrate how the long nineteenth-century novel’s spatial formalism created the imaginative conditions for early, land-focused resistances to colonial power. Joining postcolonial and environmental concerns, I discuss border crossings in Walter Scott and Rudyard Kipling; novelistic cartography in Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard; ports in George Eliot and Joseph Conrad; and agrarian plains in Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner. In their work to connect literary geography with coloniality, these novels, I argue, knit together the human, cultural, and environmental scales of British imperialism.

ETD_8766

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Kyle McAuley

doi:10.7282/T3K077QB

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.