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©2014 Ja Yun Choi ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TRAVELS TO CHINA: THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE AS A GENRE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN by JA YUN CHOI A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English written under the direction of Michael McKeon and approved by ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Travels to China: The Travel Narrative as a Genre in Eighteenth-Century Britain by JA YUN CHOI Dissertation Director: Michael McKeon This dissertation examines how the eighteenth-century British travel narrative can have a genre-like coherence while at the same time consisting of great formal variation. A mode of narration that was immensely popular due to Britain’s maritime exploration of the world, it generated a wide range of representations, making it difficult to identify a common set of formal conventions. I address this problem by focusing on narrative epistemology, a defining characteristic of the travel narrative, so that I can disclose a range of distinct subgenres that bear a generic family resemblance. Using actual and virtual travel narratives to China as my samples, I examine in each chapter a different subgenre and its formal approach to telling the “truth,” whether that be based in historical factuality or constructed imaginatively. Chapter One explores the actual scientific expedition the British partook in during the Macartney Embassy. Using the detached third-person narrator to compile the embassy members’ accounts, George Staunton conducts a narrative form of quantitative experimentation to produce an empirically objective account of Chinese culture. In Chapter Two, I discuss the explicitly speculative ii or imaginative conjectures John Barrow makes based on the empirical information he has collected during the Macartney mission to generate a probable account of China and its place in a universal history of human civilization. Chapter Three investigates Daniel Defoe’s imaginary voyage, in which he overlays England with the virtual world of China to satirize the English government. In order to promote his political project, Defoe mildly parodies the “strange, therefore true” trope to give material form to intangible concepts such as state polity. Chapter Four examines Thomas Percy’s use of a Chinese novel that relates its male protagonist’s virtual journey. Through his interruptive footnotes, Percy contributes to the novel’s aesthetic distance from the senses so as to encourage a critical comparison between the reader and the heroine, whom Percy sees as representing Chinese society. I argue that these subgenres, by embracing the utility of imaginative virtuality to different degrees in their self-conscious attempts to narrate the “truth” about China (and England), constitute a coherent genre despite their apparent formal disparities. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support of my committee members: Michael McKeon, William Galperin, Lynn Festa, and David Porter. I thank them for their careful readings and insightful comments, which have been instrumental to both the formulation and completion of my project. I am especially grateful for my advisor Michael McKeon who guided me not only through the various stages of writing this dissertation, but also through every step of my doctoral program at Rutgers University. I would like to thank my parents and my brother for their love, constant support, and unwavering faith in me, without which I could not have completed this long and difficult process. Many warm thanks to my friends, both in the US and in Korea, who also continued to provide me with emotional support (and care packages) even when I was not able to contact them regularly. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support I received from the Samsung Scholarship Foundation, allowing me to devote the first four years of my doctoral studies to coursework and reading, both of which came to form the basis of my research and dissertation. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v List of Illustrations vi Introduction 1 Chapter One 18 Scientific Travel to China: The Sociable Truth of the Macartney Embassy, 1792-1794 Chapter Two 55 Conjectural Travel to China: A “Most Interesting Subject for the Investigation of the Philosopher” in Barrow’s Travels in China Chapter Three 89 Imaginary Travel to China: Technological and Narrative Inventions in Defoe’s Consolidator Chapter Four 128 Aesthetic Travel to China: The Pleasures and Dangers of the Imagination in Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan Works Cited 171 v List of Illustrations Figure 1: Frontispiece to the second volume of Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan 134 Figure 2: Percy’s interruptive footnotes in Hau Kiou Choaan 147 vi 1 Introduction This dissertation began with my interest in the phenomenon of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel to foreign lands. There was a steady increase in British travelers during this period as they continued their maritime exploration of the global world that was first opened up by sixteenth-century voyages of discovery.1 One crucial factor that motivated the British to engage in travel overseas was the desire to discover trade routes, open markets in remote geographical locations, and accumulate new wealth. Although the British began their travels relatively late in comparison to the Spanish and the Portuguese, they soon became a serious contender by first circumnavigating the world and discovering Guiana in the sixteenth century and then crossing the Atlantic Ocean and establishing colonies in North America and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century (Bohls, Introduction xv). The colonies in the New World proved to be especially profitable as the British cultivated crops like cotton and sugar in North American plantations with African slave labor. Such mercantile and imperial activities continued well into the eighteenth century with the British additionally exploring the South Pacific, West Africa, and Asia for similar economic opportunities (Bridges 55). Of course, Britain’s commercial expansionism would not have been possible without the concomitant development of its Royal Navy. As Larry Stewart rightly points out, it was “not simply a matter of entrepreneurs striking out into ill-charted waters,” but one that “brought navies into play” as “long-standing European conflicts” broke out in the turbulent waters (826). Britain’s victories over France, its main competitor in the 1 For critical works that discuss sea travel and travel writing in the sixteenth century, see Campbell’s Witness and the Other World 165-255, Foulke 66-111, and Sell 1-192. 2 eighteenth century, resulted in the emergence of Britain as Europe’s leading naval power, which helped realize its political and imperial visions. Another way sea travel helped form Britain’s sense of identity during this period was through the knowledge the British accumulated during their voyages of discovery. Although the expeditions were for the most part commercially motivated, they were also geared towards acquiring knowledge about the natural world and non-European societies. Captain James Cook’s three expeditions to the South Pacific Ocean illustrate this well. While the main objective of his voyages was to determine the existence of Terra Australis (a continent posited to exist in the Southern Hemisphere) and the Northwest Passage (a navigable sea passage to the Arctic Ocean), both of which Cook, much to his frustration, proved did not exist, the expeditions enabled Cook and his crew members to amass an enormous amount of data about the geographical areas they traversed and the indigenous peoples they encountered (Iliffe 627, 629-31, 634). It is therefore no coincidence that Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society of London, closely collaborated with Cook throughout the entire process, equipping the ships with “the best scientific instruments,” “most up-to-date charts,” and “a greenhouse that would shelter plants against insects, rats, and seawater” (Iliffe 619-20).2 If the voyages of discovery helped enhance Britain’s scientific knowledge of the world, they also proved to be a good opportunity to test out new instruments, especially those pertaining to the technology of sea travel, which became an innovative industry during this period. For instance, the British were able to better measure longitude with the aid of a chronometer during Cook’s second expedition, a feat that ensured greater navigational accuracy in long- 2 For articles or chapters that examine the diverse means by which natural scientists established a complex network of communication and exchange with travelers and other related institutions during this period, see Harris 341-62, Findlen 454-68, and Frantz 15-29. 3 distance travel (Iliffe 634, 636). According to Klaus A. Vogel, it was such knowledge of the natural world and development of scientific devices that enabled the British to compare themselves favorably to other countries and gain “confidence in their global power” (838). Although Vogel somewhat exaggerates Britain’s self-confidence in its scientific knowledge, something that will become more apparent in my first chapter where I discuss the Macartney Embassy to China as a less self-assured expedition, the voyages of discovery