Abstract:Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars has sought out new ways of conceptualizing literature in terms of global systems. Victorianists, despite their field's monarchial nomenclature, have experimented with several such approaches. Some have mapped out 19th‐century transatlantic literary relations; others have explored the global media infrastructure constructed by Victorian imperialism; still others have traced the cross‐period resonances of Victorian literary forms and aesthetic constructs. Such a… Show more
“…In his article on transnational Victorian studies, Sebastian Lecourt wonders, “Why is meaning‐in‐context necessarily our desideratum ? What if, beyond simply tracing the migration and uptake of texts within the Victorian period, we also studied how Victorian literary texts and forms continue to shape contemporary cultures both local and global?” (2016, p. 112). This project spans many adjacent fields—#ShakeRace, #BIPOC18, #Bigger6, #VicPOC—even as it entails expanding what constitutes each individual field, and redefining the supposedly historical descriptor—Victorian, Romantic, and so forth.…”
This article evaluates the contributions of global Romanticism to the study of Romanticism at large, connecting these contributions to work in transnational 18th and 19th‐century literary studies and world literature studies. The first section provides a genealogy of global Romanticism as a subfield, which has developed into roughly two strands: studies of imperialism or slavery on the one hand, and studies of globalization or translocalism on the other. The first strand has been dominant throughout global Romanticism's history, while the latter has mostly appeared in the last decade, and each strand of scholarship has understood and mobilized historicist methodologies differently. While the impulse to historicize was well suited to scholarship on imperialism and slavery, it initially seemed presentist to speak of globalization. That has changed, and work on globalism has made it possible to see Romanticism playing out in times and places far from Britain between the French Revolution and the First Reform Act. The second section explores global Romanticism's limitations and challenges, chief among which is how to resist centering British writing and Euro‐centric epistemologies. How do critics in English studies articulate and understand their disciplinary limitations? How might World Literature studies approach a global Romanticism differently? The third section attempts to come to terms with these challenges by highlighting three productive trends in recent scholarship: close and nuanced attention to transculturation, resistance to English‐language dominance, and flexibility with regards to temporal boundaries. These developments push against ingrained practices of English literary studies in general. The final section highlights a productive direction for future work in the field by analyzing anonymous parodies of British Romantic poetry published in American newspapers. This case study joins the work of other scholars studying the unread poetry of colonialism, arguing for the importance of evanescent, seemingly disposable writing to our understanding of literary history across national borders.
“…In his article on transnational Victorian studies, Sebastian Lecourt wonders, “Why is meaning‐in‐context necessarily our desideratum ? What if, beyond simply tracing the migration and uptake of texts within the Victorian period, we also studied how Victorian literary texts and forms continue to shape contemporary cultures both local and global?” (2016, p. 112). This project spans many adjacent fields—#ShakeRace, #BIPOC18, #Bigger6, #VicPOC—even as it entails expanding what constitutes each individual field, and redefining the supposedly historical descriptor—Victorian, Romantic, and so forth.…”
This article evaluates the contributions of global Romanticism to the study of Romanticism at large, connecting these contributions to work in transnational 18th and 19th‐century literary studies and world literature studies. The first section provides a genealogy of global Romanticism as a subfield, which has developed into roughly two strands: studies of imperialism or slavery on the one hand, and studies of globalization or translocalism on the other. The first strand has been dominant throughout global Romanticism's history, while the latter has mostly appeared in the last decade, and each strand of scholarship has understood and mobilized historicist methodologies differently. While the impulse to historicize was well suited to scholarship on imperialism and slavery, it initially seemed presentist to speak of globalization. That has changed, and work on globalism has made it possible to see Romanticism playing out in times and places far from Britain between the French Revolution and the First Reform Act. The second section explores global Romanticism's limitations and challenges, chief among which is how to resist centering British writing and Euro‐centric epistemologies. How do critics in English studies articulate and understand their disciplinary limitations? How might World Literature studies approach a global Romanticism differently? The third section attempts to come to terms with these challenges by highlighting three productive trends in recent scholarship: close and nuanced attention to transculturation, resistance to English‐language dominance, and flexibility with regards to temporal boundaries. These developments push against ingrained practices of English literary studies in general. The final section highlights a productive direction for future work in the field by analyzing anonymous parodies of British Romantic poetry published in American newspapers. This case study joins the work of other scholars studying the unread poetry of colonialism, arguing for the importance of evanescent, seemingly disposable writing to our understanding of literary history across national borders.
“…She argues for retaining its use, particularly in the context of transnational cultures, asking, Might preserving ‘Victorian’ as a designation, but relocating it both across the globe and beyond the time frame determined by royal rule, generate insights that the term's current usage, which its containment to history and geography, obscures? (20)Sebastian Lecourt in a different way seeks to free Victorian studies from the limitations of “history and geography.” Outlining what he sees as some of the impediments to transnational Victorian studies, he notes that the field is largely composed of those who remain wedded to New Historicist models of scholarship, on the one hand, and those “critics who cut their teeth in the 1980s and 1990s, [who desire] to heal the perceived rupture between historicist and formalist methodologies,” on the other hand (111–12) . Interestingly, Lecourt sees neo‐Victorian studies as the new frontier (with apologies for the imperialist metaphor) of transnational Victorian studies.…”
This essay explores the field of transnational neo‐Victorian studies, arguing that “transnational” does not so much signal a subcategory of the discipline of Victorian or neo‐Victorian studies as it does a recalibration of one's instruments of analysis and of one's position within a vast constellation of cultural producers and consumers, both within and without the academy. Transnational neo‐Victorian studies requires recognizing the value of what literary critic Juliet John has called “undisciplined knowledge.” It requires, moreover, a collaborative and tentative ethos that is often at odds with the structural realities of the academy. This essay first glosses some of the salient discussions around the terms “Victorian,” “neo‐Victorian,” and “transnational” before turning to an example of a transnational neo‐Victorian text, Japanese manga Kuroshitsuji (黒執事; 2007–) by Toboso Yana (枢やな), and its representation of a Chinese opium den in London's East End, in order to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of the discipline.
“…These late Victorian re‐imaginings of revolutionary Greece employ the familiar philhellenic Romantic tropes of intercultural relationships and myths of patriotic self‐sacrifice, but by relocating them in a new era and in new commercial publication settings, they challenge their former political meanings, opening them up anew to readers. Therefore, the tropes of the Greek Revolution permeating Victorian stories bear out the “triangulat[ion] of Victorian literature with other historical periods” (Lecourt, 2016, p. 112), which enriches not only our understanding of Victorian views of Greece through Romantic and philhellenic perspectives but also our reception of the Revolution's global and transhistorical meaning.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“… See also Lauren Goodlad (2015) and Lecourt (2016) for an analysis of the global turn in Victorian Studies. For a study of the representation of Greece through European media cultural networks in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Gotsi and Provata, Eds.…”
This article examines the proliferation of popular literary texts about Modern Greece in nineteenth-century British periodicals from the 1860s to the 1890s, texts that reveal the country's appeal to the Victorians, inviting them to imagine the birth and development of the new nation after the War of Independence (1821-1828). Short stories published in popular magazines, such as the New Monthly Magazine, Bow Bells and Sunday at Home, revisit the Greek Revolution and return to the popular allegory of Greece as an enslaved or endangered woman to reflect on the "Eastern question" and British colonial politics of protectionism in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, women authors like Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds and Isabella Fyvie Mayo, publishing in women's magazines, write stories and articles about the role of women in the Greek War of Independence, relating the feats of these historical or fictional figures to the "woman question" and to Victorian debates on femininity and gender, as well as national and imperial politics.In the late Victorians' re-imagining of revolutionary history, Modern Greece is not enslaved to its classical past, as in traditional philhellenist representations, but must discover its modernity through its powerful nationalist agents. Revolutionary Greece re-emerges as a symbolic event through a variety of publications, which often highlight the country's cultural hybridity and construct a transnational network of literary affiliations, creating parallelisms between Greece and Britain.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
