Until very recently, Sino-British relations have not attracted a great deal of attention from Victorianists. Unlike Asian American studies, which has been a fixture on the academic scene since the 1960s, England's literary relations with China have only begun to emerge as a point of scholarly interest in the past several years; this is despite the many events that brought the two countries into close political and cultural contact in the nineteenth century. Recently, however, perhaps spurred by what many perceive to be China's looming threat to Western economic and political domination, scholars have begun to think seriously about the long and complex ideological entanglements between China and England in the past two centuries, searching, perhaps, for ways of reconceptualizing models of power that have, throughout the twentieth century, assigned the East a subordinate position. Elizabeth Chang's Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, 2010) broke important ground in this field, and now Ross Forman's China and the Victorian Imagination compellingly exposes China's critical role in Britain's imperial self-fashioning. “China and the Chinese appear as imagined figures within British literature and as textual objects precisely because they were important social actors across the British Empire” (5), Forman argues in his introduction. Understanding China's role in the Victorian imagination, Forman continues, “is crucial to expanding our vision of empire beyond the traditional paradigms of colonizer and colonized, self and Other” (5). Such recognition of China's symbolic capital is yet fresh within Victorian studies, and Forman's book does an admirable job of laying out the tantalizing vistas of this emerging field.

What Forman does exceptionally well—and what is perhaps the most important work of his book—is his careful but firm revision of a concept of Orientalism that has proven increasingly outdated and faulty. Positioning himself against older models of Orientalism that rest on fixed binaries of power and that tend to look no further east than India, Forman states at the outset that his study seeks “above all . . . to disaggregate a unified notion of the ‘the East’” (7). In distinct contrast to India, China successfully resisted colonization. As a result, discussions of England's relations with China demand “a model of imperialism vastly different from that of formal acquisition” (80). For Forman, literature plays a crucial role in undermining the binary logic of older models of Orientalism. In his astute analyses of “treaty port narratives” as well as of works by well-known writers such as James Dalziel, Forman exposes numerous sites of resistance against the xenophobia and discrimination that have commonly described nineteenth-century British-Chinese intercourse. Fictions issuing from British writers in China, Forman amply demonstrates, display, if not a celebration of racial hybridity—through narratives of miscegenation and other forms of cultural exchange—at least an openness to the possibilities of racial diversity.

Forman divides his book into roughly two equal parts: the first dealing with British writings within and from China and the second portion discussing British writing about the Chinese in England, a population that increased significantly toward the last decades of the nineteenth century. Exploring British fears of reverse colonization and the literature of the “yellow invasion,” Forman unpacks works by well-known representatives of this genre, including Matthew Shiel, Thomas Burke, and Sax Rohmer. Why and how, Forman asks, do “Chinese bodies acquire different identities when textually located in British space” (131)? Forman's analyses offer compelling insights into this question, and his argument shifts fluidly from using a critical framework of racial “passing” to examine narratives of the Chinese in disguise to providing convincing explanations for the anxiety that underlay so much of sinophobic literature. Speaking of the “invasion novels” that constitute much of this genre and that so often feature Western-educated and technologically ingenious villains, Forman notes, for instance, the “specific coding of the Oriental imitation of European technology in a moral context. Under this schema, the ‘rights’ to technology lie firmly with the civilzed, to be taught to Eastern subalterns only so long as production and distribution remain firmly in the hands of the European imperial center. When access to technological innovation falls outside these boundaries, however, it is immediately labeled as malevolent and out of control” (145). Such fears that the West has equipped the East with precisely the weapons that will result in the West's own subordination are hardly limited to a nineteenth-century context, and the strength of Forman's writing makes the implications for modernity both unavoidable and poignant.

If there is a fault to be found in Forman's book, it is that it leaves the reader hungering for more. The somewhat scattered discussions of gender, for example, in the chapter on boys' adventure fiction in resposne to the 1901 Boxer Rebellion and again in the discussion of Burke's stories, are enticingly incomplete as are the sporadic moments of dialogue between British and American attitudes toward China and the Chinese in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the strengths of Forman's work far outweigh any weaknesses, if the gaps left for further inquiry are even to be counted as such.