Power and representation in Victorian discourse on China.

摘要

The Victorian period produced a considerable body of writing on China which has received little critical attention. The two goals of the dissertation are, therefore, to draw attention to the much larger corpus of writing by studying a small but important selection and to examine the relationship between power and representation in such writing. I make use of pertinent theoretical insights offered by postcolonial critics, but my focus is on the relationship of power between Britain and China that produced the texts and the textual strategies whereby Victorian discourse on China rewrites that relationship, as the history of British violence against China is consistently marginalized and displaced by narratives of moral superiority.;Chapter One looks at Sir John Francis Davis's early and influential study, The Chinese. The chapter argues that the text's constructions of the Chinese as treacherous, cruel and unjust make possible the representation of the British as innocent victims in the pursuit of fair trade just prior to the Opium War.;Chapter Two examines botanist Robert Fortune's Three Year' Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China. His book is considered an accurate, firsthand account of the first five treaty ports. His representations of a deceitful, xenophobic and cowardly people enable him to write himself as a hero, with the treaty ports as the site of self-glorifying adventures.;Chapter Three looks at six short satirical pieces of fiction carried in Bentley's Miscellany between 1840 and 1845. These rare stories construct the Chinese as possessing inverted moral values, configuring what is necessarily implied by the Carlylean equation between Might and Right.;Chapter Four examines James Payn's By Proxy, possibly the first novel in English to use China as a background for a significant part of the action. The narrative becomes entangled in self-contradictions as it constructs a moral hierarchy it cannot sustain.;Chapter Five examines G. A. Henty's With the Allies to Pekin, a boys' novel of the Boxer Movement of 1900. The narrative establishes British moral superiority, the justification for imperial expansion, by re-writing history as an individual struggle between the idealized Self and the wholly evil Other.