Future states: imperial violence and nonlinear time in late Victorian fiction
Creators: name: Reinken, Brian
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This dissertation explores how British fiction published from 1860 to 1900 responded to the geopolitical violence of New Imperialism by imagining nonlinear forms of time that replace failed narratives of historical progress with open-ended, nonviolent futures. It offers a new reading of literary history by dwelling on the formal and political innovations of nineteenth-century prose fiction, whose experiments in literary temporality laid the groundwork for anticolonial evaluations of imperialism’s future. Scholars have traditionally emphasized nineteenth-century British literature’s optimism about the likelihood of gradual historical improvement. This project, in contrast, builds on recent histories of the nineteenth century and studies of colonial liberalism to demonstrate how the ubiquity of imperial violence led some British writers to regard the future with horror and dismay. In their eyes, doctrines of progress had become inseparable from perpetual bloodshed in the name of civilization. Consequently, they rejected progress as an inherently desirable goal, and they developed nonlinear modes of time through which to imagine the advent of nonviolent futures. This dissertation reveals that the prospect of sudden catastrophe remained central to Victorian ideas of time even when gradualist models of history were gaining traction in the wake of evolutionary theory. It identifies the temporal experiments typically associated with twentieth-century modernism as outgrowths of nineteenth-century fiction, not departures from it. Above all, it demonstrates that writers of British fiction had already developed a sophisticated tradition of anticolonial discourse by the end of the nineteenth century. These writers contributed to literary aesthetics, but they also contemplated how to inaugurate more ethical practices of international politics in a globalizing, multipolar world. The project’s introduction addresses how the Indian Rebellion of 1857 encouraged British intellectuals, including John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, to assume that progress always entails bloodshed. In this context, the subsequent four chapters combine historicist and formalist analysis to show how British writers salvaged the possibility of a nonviolent future by developing nonlinear narratives that reject linear progress altogether. Each chapter examines a particular genre: the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, the travelogue, and the invasion narrative. George Eliot reimagines biblical prophecy as a mode of historical scholarship to decry the increasing prominence of force in European international relations; Olive Schreiner and H. Rider Haggard reinvent the Bildungsroman as an open-ended narrative form whose forking paths register the multiple possible futures available to war-torn settler colonies in southern Africa; Rudyard Kipling laments the homogenizing effects of British soft power by writing global travelogues defined by a pervasive sense of déjà vu; and H. G. Wells and M. P. Shiel envision the complete partition of the world among imperialist powers as a synonym for the end of time itself. A brief conclusion to the project contends that anticolonial treatises by J. A. Hobson and Mohandas Gandhi inherit the nineteenth-century practice of envisioning a nonviolent future by means of nonlinear time. Their work demonstrates how major strands of twentieth-century anticolonial discourse adopted and adapted the formal techniques of Victorian fiction.