Britain

Abstract

Britain KIRSTIE BLAIR I N the opening of this brief polemic, I must acknowledge conscious bias: as of 5 a.m. on the morning after the Brexit referendum, I am a card-carrying member of the Scottish National Party. This was not anticipated. Brought up in Belfast as an Ulster-Scots Unionist with a determination to be "British" rather than "Irish," and educated in the most English of institutions, I am now in the awkward position of being grateful for the Irish state's continuing political claim on Northern Ireland, which renders me an EU citizen. Once, I was clear that I was British. Now, I am not so sure. Once, I considered myself a scholar of Victorian Britain. Now, I am increasingly aware that up until 2013 I was exclusively a scholar of Victorian England, and, in the present moment, my research is strongly aligned with "Scottish studies," a field which has had surprisingly little dialogue with "Victorian studies." In recent years, the field of Victorian literature and culture has seen crucial, transformative work on global Victorian studies, world Victorianism, transnational, transatlantic, transcultural, and cosmopolitan Victorian studies. This has involved substantial questioning of nationalisms and national boundaries. What I want to suggest, however, is that in placing British literature within a more "global" concept of Victorian literature and culture, the complexities of national, regional and local identities within "Victorian Britain" have sometimes been subsumed or ignored. How many works of scholarship on British-based writers or texts are published each year in which the phrases "Victorian culture" and "Victorian literature" actually mean English culture and literature? Are we in danger of reproducing a clustering of resources not simply towards England, but towards London and the south of England, which has been increasingly recognized and critiqued in twenty-first 590