Distancing the Proximate Other: Hybridity and Maud Diver's Candles in the Wind

Mijares, Loretta M.

doi:10.2307/4149275

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Therefore, Victorians who were anxious about the survival of the superior 'race' felt strongly about maintaining racial purity. In discussing the representation of Eurasians in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British Indian literature, Loretta M. Mijares (2004) comments that as a standard trope, the half-caste is 'granted a strange agency' where he has the power 'to choose the inherent qualities of his own make-up' and 'is generally perverse enough to pick the worst qualities of the two races' (p.120). Mijares posits that '[t]his convoluted rhetoric of relocated agency and blame enables a disavowal not only of responsibility to the entity fathered by the colonizer but also of similitude between father and bastard child' (p.120).…”

Section: The Mixed-race Heromentioning

confidence: 99%

China in a Book: Victorian Representations of the ‘Celestial Kingdom’ in William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China

Chen

2011

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Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel. Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire.

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Section: The Mixed-race Heromentioning

confidence: 99%