Between Romantic revolution and Victorian propriety: The cultural work of British missionary narratives

My dissertation explores the intersection between popular literature and the narratives of British missionaries to China written between 1807 and 1907. In my Introduction, I show how these narratives have been generally excluded from the most prominent, recent postcolonial theory and have often been misrepresented by cultural critics. Addressing this exclusion and misrepresentation, I offer an alternative theoretical approach which resituates these narratives in their historical and literary contexts. I argue that the missionary narratives give valuable insight into the cultural anxieties produced by Evangelical foreign missions and British imperialism. I explore the cultural work these narratives performed, demonstrating how culture is reshaped when different discourses, in this case the religious and the secular, borrow subject matter, themes and literary devices from each other.;Chapters Three and Four examine the influence of Romanticism on missionaries to China. I explore how the missionary narratives reinvest the Romantic impulses of revolutionizing and journeying with a deep Evangelical fervor. The missionaries use Romantic images and literary motifs such as the revolutionary hero and the picturesque landscape to mobilize and gain support for the missionary movement in China.;Chapter Five explores how missionary narratives register important points of cultural ambivalence in major and minor literary works of the period. I examine, more specifically, conflicting views about dress and its meaning in Victorian books of etiquette, Victorian novels and missionary narratives. The traditional Victorian view of dress was challenged both in theory and practice by missionaries who adopted Chinese dress. This debate points to an ambivalence within Victorian society about cultural and national identity in an environment of fervent British imperialism.;Chapter Two explores the conflict between public vocation and private ministry as it is treated in George Eliot's Adam Bede, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth through the literary figure of the missionary. These novelists borrowed the form of their novels from the missionaries. Their novels, I argue, are a secularized, domesticated version of the missionary narrative which the novelists to attract Evangelical readers and, at the same time, to protest the missionary movement.