“…We have, she points out, lapsed into the unquestioned view that there are objects of analysis that are "proper" to us, and that these lie within temporal and geographic boundaries. 41 Mine is an analogous provocation. We must defamiliarize the anglophone North Atlantic such that it no longer appears to be an authentic, natural, or given domain but rather a space whose contours we have assumed, selected, and created at the very outset of our study.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Pablo Mukherjee echoes Marcus's lament that "debates about 'comparativism' and 'world systems' are more muted in Victorian studies than comparative literature," 34 and we may perhaps attribute these failings to what Caroline Levine chidingly identifies as Victorianists' unquestioning reliance on texts and authors that are "autochthonous" to nineteenth-century Britain. 35 While Aamir Mufti's welcome polemic Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016) critiques anglophone bias in the field of world literature, Victorian studies has not yet opened a similar debate.…”
This essay argues that scholarship being done under the sign of transatlantic studies, and Victorian transatlantic studies in particular, is problematically focused on the anglophone northern Atlantic region. Challenging both the essentialness and the disciplinary primacy of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, I argue instead that the entire nineteenth-century Atlantic world was a geographically and linguistically permeable space. Paying attention to crossings from north to south and vice versa is both methodologically and ethically necessary. From a methodological perspective, it can help us produce much more thorough answers to the questions transatlantic studies purports to ask about identity and community. But reading beyond anglophone British and U.S. American texts can also help us decolonize our reading and thinking. Of course, work like this requires scholars to read in second and third languages; as such, this essay discusses and denaturalizes the institutional barriers to multilingual English studies. It also offers a case study—a brief reading of a novel by Argentine writer Vicente Fidel López—demonstrating the insights that can be gained by expanding both our geographic perspective and our methodological toolbox.
“…We have, she points out, lapsed into the unquestioned view that there are objects of analysis that are "proper" to us, and that these lie within temporal and geographic boundaries. 41 Mine is an analogous provocation. We must defamiliarize the anglophone North Atlantic such that it no longer appears to be an authentic, natural, or given domain but rather a space whose contours we have assumed, selected, and created at the very outset of our study.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Pablo Mukherjee echoes Marcus's lament that "debates about 'comparativism' and 'world systems' are more muted in Victorian studies than comparative literature," 34 and we may perhaps attribute these failings to what Caroline Levine chidingly identifies as Victorianists' unquestioning reliance on texts and authors that are "autochthonous" to nineteenth-century Britain. 35 While Aamir Mufti's welcome polemic Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016) critiques anglophone bias in the field of world literature, Victorian studies has not yet opened a similar debate.…”
This essay argues that scholarship being done under the sign of transatlantic studies, and Victorian transatlantic studies in particular, is problematically focused on the anglophone northern Atlantic region. Challenging both the essentialness and the disciplinary primacy of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, I argue instead that the entire nineteenth-century Atlantic world was a geographically and linguistically permeable space. Paying attention to crossings from north to south and vice versa is both methodologically and ethically necessary. From a methodological perspective, it can help us produce much more thorough answers to the questions transatlantic studies purports to ask about identity and community. But reading beyond anglophone British and U.S. American texts can also help us decolonize our reading and thinking. Of course, work like this requires scholars to read in second and third languages; as such, this essay discusses and denaturalizes the institutional barriers to multilingual English studies. It also offers a case study—a brief reading of a novel by Argentine writer Vicente Fidel López—demonstrating the insights that can be gained by expanding both our geographic perspective and our methodological toolbox.
“…These include the discrete yet intersecting spaces of metropolitan and colonial cultural production, the complexities of which are exacerbated by their discrete yet intersecting economic and political histories. These difficulties aren't helped, of course, by the fact that the nation‐based configuration of historical literary studies means that—unlike the field of imperial history—the study of imperial literature is subsumed within British Victorian studies, even as that field largely remains shaped by a national “logic of authochthony” (Levine, , p. 649). On top of this, as Rudy eloquently points out, any such project seems almost fatally compromised from the outset because the ethical imperative to engage with Indigenous voices and perspectives is confronted by their almost total absence from the literary archive: Focusing on British emigrant poetry has meant that the authors examined, with just one exception, are white, and the absence of nonwhite voices in this body of poetry is a persistent, painful reminder of the iniquities that shaped the British colonial world.…”
Victorian literary criticism is yet to fully engage with the new historiography of the 19th-century settler empire. That body of work has focused attention on a vast transnational network of population, capital, and information exchange, and attending to the centrality of shared ideas of British identity has revealed a uniquely close relationship between cultural and economic forms of imperialism. Significant methodological challenges confront any attempt to seriously consider the literary bonds between Britain and its settler colonies, including issues of form, scale, aesthetics, and politics. However, continued failure to grapple with that difficult critical task risks perpetuating a form of silent approval that so often surrounded the culture of the settler empire in the Victorian era.If history constitutes "the ultimate ground as well as the untranscendable limit of … our textual interpretations in particular" (Jameson, 1981, p. 100), what are we to make of the fact that historians have for some time been pursuing a vast and complex vision of 19th-century imperialism that has thus far made almost no impact upon the field of Victorian literary studies? Presented under a variety of rubrics that undoubtedly reflect significant differences in understanding of territorial scope and constitutive qualities-Anglo-world (Belich, 2009), British World (Bridge & Fedorowich, 2003), Britannic World (Darwin, 2009), Greater Britain (Bell, 2007)-this work is nevertheless united by a sense that the transnational expansion of British identity and culture through settler colonialism in the 19th century is a huge story that has been hiding in plain sight. In a review essay of the burgeoning historical scholarship,Stephen Howe (2012) expresses surprise at the silence of literary scholars:[T]here has been so far a relative dearth of literary and cultural studies work on global Britishness … maybe the lit. crit. community have missed that particular boat? The writing on literary and cultural themes about Australia or Canada adopting colonial or postcolonial discourse approaches … has been almost entirely "internalist" … rather than looking seriously at how they may have related to wider arguments about identity, including those within Britain. (2012, pp. 700-701).
“…Turning to Caroline Levine's brilliant and influential essay, "From Nation to Network," for instance, Levine rightly asks us to consider "why Britain especially matters," and notes that scholars "whose work stays within Britain often say nothing about the national frame." 3 But the national frame she refers to as "British" is implicitly English, since there is no mention of the gradual development of alternate "national frames" in Scotland and Wales. If-as I entirely agree-there is a problem in allowing the assumption that "Victorian" authors are "born in Britain" to go unrecognized, there is another problem in suggesting that writers born in Scotland or Wales would have necessarily considered themselves "British-born."…”
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
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