A plethora of fine books on Victorian India have been published in the last decade or so, a number of them in the past three years. These works cover a wide range of postcolonial thought: histories of Indian sub-cultures (Bhavani Raman's Document Raj, on scribal culture in the Madras East India company and Davesh Soneji's study of the devadāsī of South India in Unfinished Gestures); histories of English dissident subcultures (late Victorian homosexuals and vegetarians, among those documented in Leela Gandhi's Affective Communities); Andrea Major's epic Slavery, Abolitionism, and Empire in India, 1772–1843, and the erudite and comprehensive Oxford edition, India and the British Empire, edited by Douglas Peers and Nandini Gooptu, a magisterial work that begins with recognition of the “remarkable efflorescence over the past generation” (1) in historical studies of colonial India.

In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the experience of missionaries among peoples as diverse as the ancient civilizations of India, the highly organized Zulu kingdoms, and the cannibal tribes of the South Seas had sparked a national debate concerning whether or not the “civilization of the heathen” was necessary before they could be converted, or whether Christianity would be the best means of civilizing them. Unresolved as far as public policy was concerned, this question entered discussions of the 1835 Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), a committee convened to address problems arising between British settlers and indigenous communities, including important trade sites in Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the Pacific. As with several other areas where significant British imperial pressure never took the form of direct colonial rule, the trade ports in China fell outside the committee's explicit considerations. Along with forbidding foreign settlements, Chinese culture did not fit the terms or assumptions of the committee's conversation. Since the first Jesuit mission to China in the late sixteenth century, there had been little doubt in Europe that Chinese civilization was far advanced. As a tightly controlled bureaucratic state confident of its own position as the Middle Kingdom of the world, China simply did not work within the discourse of civilization. This essay explores one attempt to adjust the terms of that British discourse in order to accommodate a civilized China.

In her influential work, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (2002), Catherine Hall argued that “a focus on national histories as constructed, rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created, rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking” (9). Similarly, Antoinette Burton made a provocative case for de-centering Britain even in the narratives of its own history, arguing in her edited collection, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (2003), that “we need to pay more attention to the question of who needs [the nation], who manufactures the ‘need’ for it, and whose interests it serves” (6). In the last two decades, those who have sought to reposition a study of nineteenth-century Britain in such a transnational framework have focused their attention on Britain's relationship to its imperial possessions. While some historians remain skeptical about the significance of empire in British culture, there is now a rich and authoritative historical literature that reveals the myriad ways in which metropole and empire were not only entangled, but also mutually constitutive. Literary scholars of the nineteenth-century have also been alert to the often covert traces of empire in the works of nineteenth-century writers, extending from pioneering discussions of the shadowy presence of slavery in the novels of Jane Austen to Jane Bownas's attempts to reclaim an imperial motif in the works of Thomas Hardy.

The fictional setting of the “Shropshire” of A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1894) is well known. He himself admitted to hardly having visited the county before the publication of his cycle of poems and the topography of the county in verse and actuality are often two different things. For instance, Hughley, whose steeple in the poems is a “far-known sign,” as Housman's brother Laurence discovered on a post-publication visit, is located in a valley and the remarkable spire turns out to be squat rather than soaring (Burnett, Letters 1: 90). The particular form of unreality that will be the subject of this paper is not, however, the physical backdrop of Housman's poems, imaginary or otherwise. Rather I would like to focus on the way in which the imaginative universe of Housman is populated by figures who challenge our assumptions about the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead. We might say that I will be concerned not with the epistemology of Housman's Shropshire but with its ontology, or perhaps, to use a term of Derrida's, with its “hauntology” (Specters 10, 51, 161). Indeed, my suggestion will be that far from being an untrue or fictional world, the phantasmal figures of Housman's Shropshire articulate that reality that is named, in the late work of Jacques Derrida, as the spectral. My essay will elaborate the question of the spectral as an interplay between the poems of Housman and the philosophical meditations of Derrida.

The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it. This relative absence is all the more perplexing given that ecocritical work on Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature is so profuse. Thoreau and Wordsworth remain the most-discussed authors in a field that was in many respects inaugurated by Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Romanticism remains the point of departure for some of the most influential studies in the field, including those like Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2009) that challenge many of its core precepts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has expanded to include many other periods and regions, with collections ranging from The Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) to Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), and unsurprisingly, a strong turn toward the contemporary.

In his recently published bookThe Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson presents his take on the pervasive struggle between the realist mode's origins and its ostensible demise. Throughout his career, Jameson has been dissatisfied with the numerous binary oppositions into which realism is so often inserted and the insufficiently historicized value judgments that tend to go with them. In this new work, Jameson argues that realism is instead caught between and constituted by the opposing poles of story and affect. He argues that “the irrevocable antagonism between [these] twin (and entwined) forces . . . are never reconciled, never fold back into one another in some ultimate reconciliation and identity; and the very force and pungency of the realist writing [here examined] is predicated on that tension, which must remain an impossible one, under pain of losing itself altogether and dissipating if it is ever resolved in favor of one of the parties to the struggle” (11). Jameson locates the “final battle” between the antinomies of realism “in the microstructures of language” and “against the dominance of point of view which seems to hold the affective impulses in check and lend them the organizing attribution of a central consciousness” (11). For Jameson, this formal and linguistic face-off “exhaust[s] and destroy[s]” realism, and whatever “odd assortment of random tools and techniques” we recognize in the post-nineteenth-century world are but remnants of realism's “shriveled posterity” (11). Thus, Jameson insists the book of realism is closed, and as Harry Shaw has noted, “he appears . . . to have maintained a consistent line throughout his career” (Narrating Reality 27n31).

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).

A drastic shift in British perceptions of China took place between the beginning and end of the nineteenth century. Up through the first decades of the nineteenth century, China and its ideals as well as its art and aesthetic were widely admired. Yet by the end of the century, the discourse surrounding China had become very different: no longer were the Chinese admired for their art or their morals; instead, they were castigated as amoral, pitiless, inscrutable liars. Why and how this change took place has not yet been explored in part because scholars have tended to focus on either the beginning of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, rather than on the years between these periods. Yet those years saw the rise of sinology, which became established as a field of scholarship in precisely the period (from roughly 1870 to 1901) that has so far been neglected. This scholarship, highly specialized though it might seem (and was), was not confined to the Ivory Tower; it made its way to the educated, upper-middle-class reading public through periodicals. If we look at what British periodicals were teaching their readers about China and the Chinese language during this gap period, we can see – perhaps surprisingly – a concerted and earnest effort being made to avoid assumptions that the Chinese need British help and to avoid pro-Christian judgments, in favor of an attempt to learn the workings of the Chinese language as the first step towards understanding the Chinese on their own terms. What scholars learn and what periodicals teach about the Chinese language, however, leads these very same would-be enlightened people, in the end, to see the Chinese as cunning children incapable of complex thought or basic feeling, and therefore incapable of progress or morality. In other words, the increasing British prejudice against the Chinese originated to an important degree in the work of the first scholars of sinology, rather than in the fears of the ignorant or the culturally-marginalized. Examining this process challenges a paradigm dominant in postcolonial studies, in which modern scholars decry the supremacy of Western systems while problematically replicating a narrative in which the concept of Western systemic supremacy is not challenged and the existence of non-Western systems is not acknowledged. In the case of China, the complexity of its written and spoken language systems helped frustrate Western efforts at colonization, and this systemic resistance to Western domination was constructed by Western scholars in such a way as to create and justify sinophobia.

In their collection of essays, The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (1999), Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee identified and named a movement in economic literary studies and sought to place it alongside a cultural turn in economics. In their introduction, they offer possible reasons for the proliferation of scholarship in literature, culture, and economics. One is that “the critical pendulum has decidedly swung back toward historicist methods” and away from formalist approaches (3); another is that the 1980s thrust “interest rates, stock market speculation, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and so on, into the public attention as never before since the 1930s” (4). Today, the proverbial pendulum has swung back toward formalism, and it is now surprising to encounter their comparison of the 1980s to the 1930s because we have become so accustomed to claim that comparison to the 1930s for our own post-2008 economy.

In 2001 Laurel Brake wrote an article entitled “On Print Culture: The State We're In.” Now, almost fifteen years later, where does the term “print culture” stand in relation to Victorian studies? Brake was both brave and wise in her speculations. She knew very well that terminology – and fields and theories – have lives of their own and yet that sometimes someone has to step forward and try on certain names for size, make a pitch for style and fit and function. Brake took that risk in her endorsement of print culture. This essay considers the ways in which print culture has resonated in the intervening years by reviewing both books that have engaged productively with the term and books that have not used the term and yet are working under its umbrella.