Form and Global Consciousness in the Victorian Period

Abstract

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

Transnational Neo‐Victorian Studies: Notes on the Possibilities and Limitations of a Discipline

“…For a good summary of these terminological debates in global 19th‐century studies, see Ayşe Çelikkol's “Form and Global Consciousness in the Victorian Period,” which usefully parses the similarities and differences in scholars' recent work, including Regenia Gagnier's Individualism , Decadence , and Globalization (), Tanya Agathocleous's Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (), and special issues of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Next (2007) and Victorian Literature and Culture (2010), edited by Lauren E. Goodlad and Julia Wright and Tanya Agathocleous and Jason Rudy, respectively. Paul Jay's 2013 Global Matters offers a concise overview of what he calls the “transnational turn” in literary studies, though in his telling transnationalism is a 20th‐century phenomenon arising out of postcolonial and ethnic studies in the 1960s and signifying “a breakdown of a late 19th‐century Arnoldian model of literary study” (17), so his treatment of transnationalism in the longue durée leaves something to be desired.…”