Abstract

Reviewed by: The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature by Jessie Reeder Winter Jade Werner The Forms of Informal Empire: Britain, Latin America, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. By Jessie Reeder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2020. x+ 277 pp. £79.44. ISBN 978-4214-3807-8. The Forms of Informal Empire is a remarkable achievement in nineteenth-century British literary studies. In considering how British economic power over newly sovereign Latin American nations influenced dominant imperial discourses, it not only explores a topic largely hidden in plain sight in Victorian literary studies. It also pulls off an impressive balancing act in the myriad ways it attends to this critical lacuna. Historical analyses of Latin American politics and economics are tied to broader discussions of literary form, and theoretical interventions in empire studies are coupled with theoretical interventions in comparativist modes of reading. The result is a compelling formalist account of transatlantic imperialism. Jessie Reeder's historical framing is the early nineteenth-century Latin American wars of independence and their aftermath. Even as Britain celebrated the region's freedom from Spanish domination, it engaged in an 'ad hoc but nonetheless effective effort' to bring Latin America under its sway. Thus, 'Latin America, in effect, traded formal Spanish rule for informal British rule' (p. 2). But 'informal empire', notes Reeder, represented a 'difficult conceptual paradox—that Latin America might be both a signal example of self-rule and a dependent territory of the British Empire' (p. 3). This paradox is the nucleus of Reeder's subsequent arguments: if much of nineteenth-century thought moulded itself around the 'master forms' of the progress narrative and the nuclear family (p. 4), informal empire's conceptual irresolvability tended to place these forms under strain. [End Page 115] The remainder of the book shows how this is so. The book is divided into two parts, one on 'progress' and the other on 'family'. Chapters on 'progress' examine the writings of Simón Bolívar, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Anthony Trollope to demonstrate how informal empire 'crashed illogically against the specific sequential forms of the progress narrative' (p. 43). Subsequent chapters on 'family' turn to Vicente Fidel López, H. Rider Haggard, and William Henry Hudson. Here, Reeder uncovers how the familial forms used to conceptualize relations between Latin America and Britain—the 'rigidly hierarchical, paternalistic […] Family of Man' and the 'loving, equitable' spousal relationship—were 'irreconcilably opposite' (p. 128). Grounded in careful close readings and extensive scholarship, each chapter lucidly describes the 'thick relationship' between history and narrative form (p. 25). Of course, a book that ventures into territory seldom explored cannot be all things to all readers. For instance, Reeder's arguments could be extended by a narrower focus on the postcolonial implications of transatlantic comparativism. Engaging with recent research in world and comparative literature (for example, Siraj Ahmed, Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)) might productively complicate future transatlantic comparativist work by raising questions about, for instance, the critical deployment of the category 'Latin America'; the types of works from the Americas which tend to (or ought to) be accorded primacy; and how various modes of reading are inevitably bound up in or even created by imperial asymmetries. A further area of productive exploration introduced by Reeder is religion. Although the topic thrums in the background of her book, it never emerges as a significant topic of exploration in its own right. Yet her analysis opens the door for future considerations of how the 'forms of informal empire' were influenced as much by tensions between the multisectarian instantiations of Spanish—Latin American Catholicism and English Protestantism as they were by economic and political factors. In sum, The Forms of Informal Empire moves the needle of nineteenth-century British literary studies towards the more expansive global framework called for by the authors of the influential essay 'Undisciplining Victorian Studies' (Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, Victorian Studies, 62 (2020), 369–91). It is an invigorating and important contribution, one that reminds us of the inevitable entanglement of imperialism and narrative form, even as it alerts...