Title: Rural Utopia and Colonial Discourse in Haggard’s Allan Quatermain

Abstract: The late Victorian British writer Henry Rider Haggard is world-famous for his African adventure novels. His Allan Quatermain depicts Africa as a countryside imbued with nostalgic overtones, linking colonial adventure with British rural nostalgia. The novel portrays the adventure as an escape from England into the past. With fictionalized nature, it turns two African settlements into “enclaves” of the English countryside, creating a rural utopia free of commerce and industry. Backed by rural discourse, the novel rejects the early Victorian colonial discourse of “trade and Christianity,” thus both whitewashing colonial activity and renewing colonial discourse.

Keywords: Henry Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain, Victorian Era, The Country and the City in the Modern Novel, imperial nostalgia

Author: Jinxian Wu, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.03.015