Literary crossings: Britain and the Americas in the nineteenth century

During the Romantic and Victorian eras British writers represent discovery, reform and empire through literary treatments of the Americas, contributing to the creation of the ideology of a “just empire” in Britain. This research accounts for an area of study that has been neglected; though an important critical focus, British imperialism in the East does not represent all of Britain's imperial interests. Drawing on the critical models of Todorov, Pratt, Blackburn, Beer, Leask, Gallagher, Richardson, and others, the first half of this work examines how the Americas shape the Romantic trope of discovery in aesthetic and scientific discourses, as seen in the works of authors like William Blake and Robert Southey, and non-canonical Romantics like Helen Maria Williams and Alexander Von Humboldt. The literary treatment of discovery in these writers is bound up with the question of the Other, which during the Romantic era has its Western dimension in the political struggle for the abolition of slavery, and the various independence movements throughout the Western hemisphere. Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle is considered as a text that bridges Romantic and Victorian discourses of discovery and Otherness. Darwin redefines the role of the discoverer as inherited from Humboldt by creating an authorial persona that mediates between Britain and the Americas, empirical observation and previous scientific travelers, and the English and the Other. These mediations result in a construction of Otherness predicated on the ideology of improvement, which functions to create a distance between the English and the colonial Other. The relationship between the discourses of abolition and reform in the essays of Carlyle, Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Trollope's West Indies and the Spanish Main suggest, however, that the metropolis is not impervious to the influence of the colony. A discussion of W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land and Green Mansions provides a retrospective view of the transatlantic relationship of the Americas and England, in which the picture of a less than victorious Britain emerges, testing the circumscribed dynamic of conqueror and conquered taken as an a priori in currently available critical models.