Geographies of nineteenth-century narrative

In the Victorian era the English novel unsettles conventions of representation. It does so by favoring stories about unsettled, displaced characters, and by disturbing its readers with uncomfortable depictions of imperialism abroad. The interlinked levels – formal, figurative, interpretive – through which we can approach the novel's engagement with colonial spaces provide myriad ways of surveying Victorian narratives of empire.

A familiar kind of survey operates at a diegetic level, tracing geopolitical events and foreign or domestic environments as they resonate within the plots of Victorian colonial fiction. A less familiar approach would retell the story of the novel's imperial contexts through a more aesthetically oriented account of its formal tendencies. This alternative approach, which I essay here, does not dispense with literary-political connections; but it does compel us to question linear or evolutionary models of the novel's development from a solely thematic point of view. It provides instead a map of narrative strategies organized by discrete phases of stylistic innovation. Rather than rehearse the assumption that writers become symptoms of their age – producing fiction that passively or unconsciously reflects a time of increasing anxiety about the Empire's legitimacy – we would do better to consider this geopolitical climate from a writerly point of view by exploring the extent to which novelists develop new modes, or test existing ones, for responding to colonial governance.