ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the telescoping rearrangement of the pan-Atlantic in Victorian representations of the Americas, one that dramatizes the fluctuations of British capital in the form of bonds and loans to emancipated republics even as it downplays commercial ties with Brazil and Cuba. This telescoping deflects the failures of British investment in this region onto compensatory narratives of continuous revolution. The chapter examines The Purple Land, the first novel by William Henry Hudson, as a work that enacts the portability of culture as a sign for the invisible flows of capital between Britain and South America. It performs a cultural adaptability that conceals Britain's trade with slave-holding countries like Brazil and its own role in the social unrest of Latin American societies. The Purple Land dramatizes the permeability of nation states and the mutual adaptability of Latin American and British identities to transnational flows of culture that accompany capital across borders.
