British Fiction & Ethnography

This book is about the study and development of ethnography as a science and about British fiction written from the end of the Victorian period to the 1930s. Ethnography influenced fiction considerably and vice versa. Snyder chooses proponents from each discipline who took their skills to new areas and used elements from the other to make this transition. Her discussion shows a mature appreciation of the need to consider literature (in this case British) out of the boxes it has been put into by critics suffering hierarchical tendencies and to read it as all part of the same culture.

By using canonical modernists and “popular” writers Snyder demonstrates that cultural influences and trends can be identified at different levels and that what “high” modernist writers were exploring may be perceived in the “low” writers as well. Her research questions are: how did ethnography help to make modernist writing possible, and how did the literary modernists subvert and reflect ethnography? By analysing aesthetic innovation in how literature acquires the authority to represent other cultures, she shows how ethnographic techniques were transmuted into literary expression in the work of H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. The ethnographic work of Sir Richard Burton, H. M. Stanley and Mary Kingsley is described with a focus on their innovations and by using a close reading of the linguistic and literary techniques employed in their writing.

The relevance of ethnography to modernism was that by studying it, in using its methods in their fiction, modernist writers could re-present their own culture, making the familiar strange as well as new. Modernist fiction describing the journeys of metropolitan observers into foreign cultures results in the observers observing each other in unfamiliar surroundings. The modernist texts used show how unfamiliarity will overwhelm the perceptions. Making the connections between the Victorian writers of adventure romance and the later stylistic innovators by using their shared dependence on ethnography as a tool is also a way to bridge what Huyssen called the “great divide” between high and low modernism. Snyder’s case is that “there was more intellectual and aesthetic exchange among those writers than is usually acknowledged.” She trounces Frederic Jameson’s views from his essay “Modernism and Imperialism” (1990), and she does the same to Gregory Castle over the exclusivity of his arguments for the Celtic Revival. Instead, Snyder takes her direction from the manifesto of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1922).

She begins with Haggard’s adventure romances, analysing the linguistic patterns that make his natives coeval. With a comparative study, she recognises the dual audience implicit in the ethnographic writing of Burton: that of his own culture, and that of the culture on which he intrudes. A close reading of Burton’s and Stanley’s literary styles is used in comparison to Haggard’s writing, showing that ethnographers were aiming to be read as tellers of tales of adventure, and that Haggard was attempting to gain credibility for his fiction by garnishing it with ethnographic method. Snyder is right to study Haggard as an important ethnoadventure writer for this period, when the fictional pseudoscholarly voice was most effective if the author already had a celebrity profile. However she does not link this trend to the longstanding tradition of the narrative of adventure bolstered with scientific, or at least didactic intent, in, for example, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1814), and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) and The Gorilla Hunters (1861).

In her analysis of Mary Kingsley’s ethnographic work, Snyder identifies a new trend of “squelching personal and cultural conceit” in ethnographic writing, which she links to Kingsley’s attempt to circumvent her dual handicap of being a woman and an amateur in her profession. This contrast to male Victorian supremacist rhetoric was presented by Kingsley in irony and self-deprecation, a self-mocking narrative that conveyed wonders but which also...