IMPERIAL, ANGLOPHONE, GEOPOLITICAL, WORLDLY: EVALUATING THE “GLOBAL” IN VICTORIAN STUDIES

Extract

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).