Victorian Cosmopolitanisms: Introduction

Agathocleous, Tanya; Rudy, Jason R.

doi:10.1017/s1060150310000069

Cited by 36 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…I affirm their point wholeheartedly and hope that this essay has taken it one step further, beyond simply an understanding of our work as a "cosmopolitan juggling act, in which we strive to close-read the aesthetic qualities of literary texts within an increasingly far-reaching historical and geographical frame." 48 Including migratory plants in our notions of cosmopolitanism and invasion does indeed extend the historical and geographical width that Agathocleous and Rudy extol. In addition, though, plants and other nonhuman species have the potential to promote newly expansive methods for studying our Victorian subjects, methods that exceed the practices of closereading texts even when we do that in a wider geographical frame.…”

Section: Opportunistic Plantsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Victorian Plants: Cosmopolitan and Invasive

Voskuil¹

2021

Victorian Literature and Culture

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The terms “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” name ideas that have long figured prominently in the practices, the methods, and the unexamined assumptions of Victorian studies. These categories also shape the study of plants, both now and in the nineteenth century, along with related terms like “native,” “exotic,” and “hybrid.” “Invasion biology,” for example, currently describes the study of how nonnative species spread around the world, and the phrase “nativism-cosmopolitanism dichotomy” has been used to describe the impasse between different approaches to global plant distribution and migration. This paper will put these variable disciplinary conceptions of “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” into conversation with each other, offering a methodological reflection with the goal of clarifying their meanings and applications in and for current scholarship of the Victorian period. If ecological uses of these ideas, like aesthetic and political uses, are rooted in the nineteenth century, their disparate strands have not yet been sufficiently disentangled. What difference does it make to speak of invasive plants as compared to human invaders? How does our sense of cosmopolitanism, empire, and invasion change when pressure is exerted from other fields? Perhaps most importantly, what are the ethical dimensions of these concepts, especially when nonhuman entities are included?

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Section: Opportunistic Plantsmentioning

confidence: 89%

Victorian Plants: Cosmopolitan and Invasive

Voskuil¹

2021

Victorian Literature and Culture

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“…68 The 'global turn' in Romantic and Victorian studies has certainly stimulated a critical reappraisal of both fields over the last two decades, with scholars exploring the relationship between aesthetics, scientific exploration, and colonial expansion, as well as considering the ways in which globalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism, among other concepts, promise to 'transform what we mean by "British" literature'. 69 Taking full account of Romantic and Victorian globalism can reveal the surprising longevity or afterlife of western conceptual and literary frameworks in non-European contexts, as well as offering new critical readings of British texts and their reception. As Nikki Hessell notes, the 'Romantic period, as a unit of literary history, lasts well into the twentieth century in indigenous thought and intellectual activity, and … such a radical reinscribing of the boundaries of the Romantic period might be essential to comprehending British texts of c. 1789-1832 themselves'.…”

Section: Southern Periodicity Forms Canons and Genresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Fermanis¹,

Comyn²

2021

Worlding the South

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Linked by the histories, geographies, and legacies of 'imperial desire', the countries and peoples of the southern hemisphere have long been shaped by their approximate otherness. 1 Defined and redefined by shifting European cartographic visions of unknown and unknowable lands inspiring exploration, discovery, conquest, and colonisation from at least the sixteenth century onwards, the qualities of distance and difference ascribed to those southern topographies by a northern gaze have more recently been remapped on to the south as an 'indexical category' and conceptual space. 2 No longer characterised solely or necessarily by hemispheric location, this south is perceived as the antithesis or antimony to the north's modernity, as belated, inverted, nugatory, and even pathological in its relation to the time/space coordinates exported by Euro-American capital and territorial expansion. 3 Whether the American South, the Mediterranean South, or the Global South, the south is nearly always an 'uncanny temporal figure', implying a vertical hierarchy of 'above and below' and 'centrality and marginality' based on the apparently normative qualities of 'free-market democracy, modernity and its absence'. 4 As Harry Harootunian reminds us, this unevenness within the global field is not an incidental or temporary condition but rather a functional outcome of a long history of imperialist and/or neo-imperialist capitalist accumulation, requiring us to reinstate the 'mixed temporalities' and 'historical uncanny' that have been 'written over' by histories of nation statehood, modernity, and globalisation. 5 Nowhere have these progressive, familiarising strategies been more apparent than in the literary histories and national canons of the historically 'British' southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where enduring myths of Anglo-Saxon cultural exceptionalism and national self-containment have persistently overwritten the uncomfortable legacies and enduring realities of settler colonialism. 6 Driven by the rise of Black Consciousness, Indigenous activism, and anti-racism movements, revisionary scholarship in multiple disciplines over the last fifty years has

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“…Journal issues arguing for specific ways of conceptualizing global frameworks for the period have also contributed to the debate about the future of the field. These include Lauren Goodlad and Julia Wright's special issue of RaVoN on “Victorian Internationalisms” (November 2007); an issue of this journal on “Victorian Cosmopolitanisms” that I co-edited with Jason Rudy (September 2010); and a special issue of the Yearbook of English Studies on “Victorian World Literatures,” edited by Pablo Mukherjee (July 2011). To isolate British literature or Victorian Britain from its imperial and international contexts, all these individual and collective interventions contended, is to be historically myopic: a major problem for a field defined from its inception by a rigorous historicism.…”

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confidence: 99%

Imperial, Anglophone, Geopolitical, Worldly: Evaluating the “Global” in Victorian Studies

Agathocleous

2015

Victorian Literature and Culture

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In the last decade or so, Victorian studies – the only major literary field identified with a British ruler – has begun a slow but inexorable shift away from its traditional nation-based parameters. A cursory glance through the book review section of prominent Victorianist journals reveals that approximately half of new books reviewed treat subjects that extend beyond Britain and British literature: Ireland, India, slavery, settler literature, Continental literature, and global technological and media networks are all examples. While this development reflects broader trends in the discipline, in the humanities, and in public discourse as a whole, arguments about the desirability of expanding the scope of Victorian studies have turned largely on the particular inaptness of the national frame for the Victorian period. Since the 1980s, postcolonial critics such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Gauri Viswanathan have argued for the significance of Britain's vast empire to its literature and the very existence of a British literary canon, as well as to literature produced in the colonies. More recently, Victorianists such as Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, Amanda Claybaugh, Caroline Levine, Sharon Marcus, and Julia Sun-Joo Lee have stressed other transnational contexts for Victorian literature, noting that Victorian writers themselves were polylingual and comparative in their understanding of both literature and culture and that “even in its heyday, print culture was international and the nation was a relative, hybrid, comparative category” (Marcus 682).

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Victorian Cosmopolitanisms: Introduction

Cited by 36 publications

References 9 publications

Victorian Plants: Cosmopolitan and Invasive

Victorian Plants: Cosmopolitan and Invasive

Introduction

Imperial, Anglophone, Geopolitical, Worldly: Evaluating the “Global” in Victorian Studies

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