Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz”
has done more, we verily believe, for the promotion of peace and goodwill between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, than all the congresses under the sun . . . . Boz, and men like Boz, are the true humanizers, and therefore the true pacificators, of the world. They sweep away the prejusdices of class and caste, and disclose the common ground of humanity which lies beneath factitious social and national systems.
Such tributes to his political powers must have been gratifying to a writer who had begun his career as a parliamentary reporter. They proclaimed the power of the writer in an age of print, bearing out Thomas Carlyle's sense that “Printing . . . is equivalent to Democracy . . . . Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making.” Fraser's elaborated on this idea by linking Dickens's uncanny ability to “introduce” characters to one another to his ability to “introduce” such characters to readers of different ranks. “Men like Boz,” the reviewer explained, “introduce the peasantry to the peerage” and “the grinder at the mill to the millionaire who owns the grist” (700).
What is the “world” in “world literature”? In publishing, as in literary criticism, this term often applies to the leftovers of the international literary market: works not drawn from the major national publishing markets. It signifies, in effect, “the rest of the world” or perhaps “the unknown world.” Yet if Édouard Glissant is right, this shortcut bred of convenience and contempt aptly names the world-historical significance of the leftovers called “world literature.” This essay reads Glissant's Poetics of Relation as a theory not of Caribbean literature but of world literature; I tease out its approach to “the world” by exploring it alongside a recent novel representing one of the local worlds with which Glissant is most concerned. I focus on Edward P. Jones's depiction of a slave plantation in Virginia in 1855 in The Known World (2003). Reading this novel in light of Mikhail Bakhtin's exploration of the “destruction of the idyll” in the novel, I consider how Jones's work imagines a relationship between a local place (a “known world”) and a totality that extends beyond it. As Glissant has argued, “Not knowing this totality is not a weakness. Not wanting to know it certainly is.” Exploring Jones's novel in light of Bakhtin's and Glissant's theories of linguistic diversity and literary form, I ask how, and to what effect, Jones's novel connects its known world to the unknown one that we might call “the world.”
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