Capital adventures: Gender, Englishness and economics in Victorian fiction (Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. Somerset Maugham, A. S. Byatt)

I argue in this dissertation that the idea of adventure was important not just to the English adventure tale but to "serious" Victorian fiction, in which it influences constructions of gender and Englishness. By adventure, I mean a specifically colonial economic enterprise (however coated it was in romantic or heroic terms), the ability to freely trade and travel that Victorian culture saw as the exclusive right of men. By contrast, upper-class Victorian women were confined to domestic England; for them, as for colonized peoples, male adventure becomes a form of surveillance and control.; The idea and materiality of colonial adventure also influenced notions of Englishness. The spoils of adventure fuelled British industry and spilled over into the daily life of the English nation, as Victorian fiction testifies. Colonial commodities came to influence not just gender, economic and political relations but the substance and appearance of the English body, its destiny in real life as well as in fiction.; Sometimes, adventure went wrong, and had lasting effects on English stock. In the fiction I consider, by Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. Somerset Maugham and the Victorianist A. S. Byatt, this manifests in the issues of miscegenation, homosexuality, "going native," fear of racial degeneration, eugenics and incest. In every work, there is a clear interest in the cultural and racial inventorying of Englishness, ultimately an "imperial construct."...