Victorian Narrative Techonologies in the Middle East

The Victorians, The Suez Canal, and Narrative explores the complex relation between narrative practice and imperial practice through an analysis of England's engagement with Egypt in the thirty-year period leading up to England's 1875 purchase of the Suez Canal, which led directly to Egypt's colonization in 1882. During this period, the Victorians readjusted their notions of character, investment, and technology. In the context of an unstable newly globalized market, the idea of what constitutes character was transformed. Related to the revaluation of character is an alteration in sentiment toward investment and technology: from the domestic speculative boom of the 1840s to the exportation of capital in the 1860s, Victorians gained a new confidence in investing, and new technology altered Victorians' relation to time/space, bringing the colonies closer to home and the idea of colonization nearer to the heart.

Using narrative theory and postcolonial theory, this study--through close readings of the novels of Dickens, Disraeli, and Jules Verne, travel narratives by Lucie Duff Gordon, Emmeline Lott, and William Simpson, and texts such as biographies, newspaper articles, and parliamentary reports--shows how novels and travel narratives functioned to carry and promote the imperial transformation of this period, suggesting that colonization works at the level of genre itself.