Imperial intersections: Imperial visions in collision and collapse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Brazil, China, British Empire)

This dissertation charts what happens when two empires collide, reevaluating nineteenth-century British imperialism by surveying the literature resulting from its important interactions with non-European empires. I argue that the case examples of Brazil and China--representing two of the largest imperial expanses in the century and sparking cultural fantasies in Britain ranging from the discovery of dinosaurs on a plateau in the central Amazon to the takeover of Britain's government by maverick mandarins--yield a broader definition of how British imperialism functioned, and one that helps explain current social and literary models of economic imperialism and postcoloniality.; Using a Cultural Studies methodology, the dissertation looks primarily, but not exclusively, at examples of imperial interchange appearing in British fiction produced from the mid-nineteenth century up to the First World War. It seeks to revisit notions of "informal imperialism" and the "imperialism of free trade" through the period's literary output. In the portion devoted to China, the dissertation examines such issues as representations of the Limehouse Chinese community in London, the fictions sparked by British involvement in the Boxer Rebellion, the fears implicated Asiatic invasion novels, and the rhetoric surrounding a homosexual scandal about the importation of Chinese coolies into South Africa just before self-rule. In the portion devoted to Brazil, the dissertation considers the role of adventure novels in creating a fantasy of Brazil as potential settler colony, as well as a Brazilian response to informal imperialism articulated in plays about the 1860s diplomatic imbroglio known as the Christie Affair.; By combining Brazilian depictions of British imperialism in South America with texts expressing Albion's own anxieties surrounding its colonizing efforts in China and Brazil, I therefore situate this dissertation within the recent paradigm shift aimed at decentering Europe and offering a transnational understanding of the development of nineteenth-century culture and nationalism. In so doing, I purpose to contribute to Victorian Studies' on-going re-evaluation of British culture in its global context and to Latin American Studies' understanding of the complex relationship between a continent "on the margins of history" (to paraphrase Euclides da Cunha) and the European "center."...