Cataloged from PDF version of article.The increased visibility of globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has\ud led scholars in various disciplines from sociology to economics to discuss its impact, scope, and\ud history. Literary criticism is no exception. This essay focuses on Victorian studies, in which the\ud effort to historicize globalization has produced new readings of familiar texts. Recently, scholars of\ud Victorian literature have been unearthing unlikely circuits of cross-cultural interaction, tracing cosmopolitan\ud sentiment, and shedding light on the ideology of the capitalist world system. This essay\ud explores how formal analysis sheds light on the history of globalization
The pastoral tends to offer a retreat from modern life, but Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell reverse this pattern. They both turn to the colonies to reconcile the pastoral mode with capitalism, and, in their pastoral depictions of colonial life, we witness that mode’s peculiar capacity to narrate what the environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls ‘the capitalist world ecology’ – the globally systemic way of putting nature to work in the service of capitalism. Set in natural environments marked by human influence, the pastoral is a mode that can register economic relations with their ecological dimensions. In Martineau’s Homes Abroad and Cinnamon and Pearls – tales in Illustrations of Political Economy – and Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the pastoral aestheticizes the role that natural environments play in the development of capitalism. Homes Abroad presents peaceful agrarian life in Van Diemen’s Land as a lucrative enterprise in accord with modernization. Turning to Ceylon, Cinnamon and Pearls imagines an organic capitalism in which the celebration of plant life goes hand in hand with emergent property borders. In Mary Barton, the final pastoral setting in Canada is home to peace and progress. The felled trees in that setting signal the appropriation of nature for profit in the timber trade. These works of fiction capture the accumulation of capital in rural and suburban areas, which was historically key to the emergence of capitalism. The pastoral’s ability to depict the capitalist world ecology reflects a preoccupation with historical forces that is already present in the mode’s roots in antiquity.
Horace's second epode features a rich usurer named Alfius who imagines the pleasures of rural life. In his account, the country provides a haven from financial circuits of credit and interest, however labor-intensive the farmer's life may be:Happy the man, who far from town affairs, The life of old-world mortals shares;With his own oxen tills his forebears' fields, Nor thinks of usury and its yields. (1907, 245) Alfius attributes timelessness to his imagined Arcadia, which offers a retreat from the city. 1 As Virgil's Eclogues (2012) demonstrates, the pastoral can represent rural economic plights such as dispossession, 2 but Alfius in his pastoral moment idealizes the country.When capitalism conquers town and country alike, what happens to the pastoral's reputed distance from "usury and its yields"? How can the pastoral mode communicate the distinctness of rural experience if, at the same time, it acknowledges the presence of capitalist relations in the country? This essay turns to a version of the pastoral that locates country life within capitalist networks of production and exchange: in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), the narrator depicts wage-labor, addresses leases and debts, and treats exchange relations as ubiquitous. Capitalist relations are not external to the characters' dealings with the crops and the sheep, but inextricable from them. The sheep are bought on credit; the wheat and barley are for the marketplace. When the pastoral is attentive to economic forces, it displays the historicity of the natural world, revealing, for example, the ways in which finance shapes the lives of nonhuman animals.Writing to Leslie Stephen about his plans for Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy identified it as "a pastoral tale" (Hardy 1962, 95). Within the novel, the designation persists. The narrator calls Gabriel Oak, at that point a tenant farmer, a "pastoral king" and describes the death of his sheep as a "pastoral tragedy" (Hardy 2002, 38). The pastoral indeed presents a useful paradigm for approaching the characters and the plot: the sheep, the corn, and the characters' dealings with them structure the flow of time, shape courtship rituals, and even mold subjectivity in the novel. Shearing and harvest rituals punctuate the plot; Gabriel and Bathsheba connect as they protect the wheat and
This essay links representations of smuggling in Walter Scott's Guy Mannering and Redgauntlet to early-nineteenth-century economic debates on free trade. It argues that the disloyal smuggler figure in these novels addresses the impact of global commodity exchange on individual subjectivity. The smuggler's status as a romance figure underlies its ability to narrate the capitalist challenge to the authority of the modern nation-state. The genre of romance helps imagine transnational subjectivity because its roots predate the nation state.
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