Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: GLOVINSKY E MPIRE, like Flaubert's ideal author, has a way of seeming everywhere present yet scarcely visible in much Victorian literature.While review sections of the field's journals attest to robust interest in nineteenthcentury imperialism and settler colonialism, racial and "free trade" ideologies, cosmopolitanisms and oceanic rims, the significance of empire for our reading of Victorian literature has remained more equivocal.Often immured within a sub-canon of important but fairly familiar works, empire-and especially its relation to literary forms and themes-can seem to be a subject more easily discussed at a dedicated conference panel than in an undergraduate survey hoping to demonstrate what is particularly valuable or interesting about nineteenth-century literature, and in particular the novel.Critics may agree that an empire based on a massive, coerced drug trade, indigenous genocide, and the unfree labor of millions was a key socioeconomic factor in nineteenth-century British culture, but it can be difficult at times to see how this history figures in the novel canon's conservative but resilient core of metropolitan, 668 VLC • VOL.
Source: Victorian Literature and Culture
Author: Will Glovinsky
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4236733066