Nineteenth-century China and travel narratives written about it have been neglected subjects in postcolonial studies, Victorian studies, and travel literature, despite the many travel narratives written by British travelers and China's economic importance in sustaining Britain's imperial effort. This project analyzes travel narrative as the expression of imperial Britain's historical, social, and political situation in China. Travel narratives about China contribute to the public discourse on Britain's empire building in an area some historians term "semicolonial," because of China's resistance to formal colonization at the height of the British Empire. Four late Victorian travel narratives about China are examined through the lens of each traveler's occupational agenda (Timothy Richard the missionary, Archibald Little the merchant, Isabella Bird Bishop the woman traveler, and Rudyard Kipling the globetrotter-tourist) as a means of reinterpreting the role of China in Britain's imperial consciousness. Each traveler's occupation is refashioned in China contrary to readers' expectations for that person's work out in the Empire, because China's unofficial imperial milieu allows a range of expression. Similarly, China's resistance to colonization refashions Britain's imperial desire in these texts.; Texual analysis in this project interrogates and extends the foundational concepts of postcolonialism laid out in Edward Said's Orientalism . The analysis of texts responds to the need to reconfigure postcolonial and Victorian studies beyond British literature's relationships to areas of imperial activity, such as India, Ireland, Africa, Turkey, and the Caribbean. The travel narratives examined in this dissertation broaden the range of imperial expression in that the travelers express an ambivalence toward British imperial desires for officially annexing nineteenth-century China, thus also challenging readerly expectations about those traveling through the British Empire. Analysis of narrative formation centers on the ethics of the imperial desire to colonize, whether through political ideology, religion, or technology, as each traveler challenges or accepts selective parts of a Christian-inflected ideology of empire building. These travelers bear witness to the social changes in China's ethical and religious structures resulting from contact with Western ideas, but their belief in China's need for systemic reforms prevent their full separation from Britain's participation in this epistemic violence.
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