“Going Native”: The New Imperialism in Late Victorian Adventure Novels She and Heart of Darkness

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The late Victorian era witnessed the flowering of New Imperialism in literary circles. Critics like Edward W. Said and Homi K. Bhabha single out English novels, especially English adventure fiction, as a unique cultural form to explore the imperial attitudes and experiences during the period. Among late Victorian works of fiction, H. Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are prominent that they both endeavor to bring forth white men’s bodily and spiritual “encounters” on their imperial journey to Africa. Current scholarship on the two texts has tended to simplify them either as a critique or approval of New Imperialism and thus categorizes the writers as pro- or anti-imperialists. However, the dissemination of the ideology in popular literature at the end of the nineteenth century was not stereotyped and homogeneous. Therefore, this study traces the similarities and differences in depicting New Imperialism through the lens of “going native.” The paper will investigate the embodiment of the idea in individual texts and inspect the two adventure fictions together within the discourse of New Imperialism. Conventional textual interpretations and computerized analysis of texts are to be conducted.