In The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience, an ambitious and theoretically wide-ranging study, Lauren Goodlad sets out to translate Fredric Jameson's theory of the geopolitical aesthetic to that most unpromising of literary objects: the Victorian realist novel. Reframing Jameson's arguments elsewhere about realism's incapacity for political critique, Goodlad argues that, by contrast, traces of world politics are to be found in the Victorian novel's thematic and formal response to pressing and unavoidable questions of sovereignty and transnationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For Goodlad, “geopolitics” describes “the means and modes through which diverse world actors, including the British state, worked consciously and unconsciously to extend the imperatives of transnational capital, inside and outside imperial formations” (6). As Jameson suggests, the associated aesthetic is to be found in literature's “unconscious, collective effort” (9) to represent the invisible effects of emerging globalization. The task is daunting, as the following chapter summary suggests.

Goodlad lays most of the theoretical groundwork in chapter 1, which she follows in chapter 2 by a case study of responses to the curious case of Kristna Raj Wodyar, the rajah of Mysore and something of a cause célèbre in political circles in the 1860s. John Morley warned that the Mysore case, which hinged on whether the British administration in India would recognize customary rights of succession in a crucial princely state, would “mark the turning-point of the career of England in India” (44). Morley was right, and Goodlad focuses on the case to indicate a key turn in Victorian politics that will feel familiar to many readers, as liberal empire gives way to the New Imperialism, marked here by the Royal Titles Act of 1876. This imperial dance over inherited sovereignty and liberalism is the historical background against which the novels in the remaining chapters will be read.

In chapters 3 and 4 Goodlad address the geopolitics submerged in Anthony Trollope's novels, with readings of The Way We Live Now and The Prime Minister offering convincing evidence that, while the Barsetshire novels long for a solid and ancient English sense of self and place, his novels from the 1870s instance a deeper sense of an emerging crisis in the face of the New Imperialism. In this later work, which Goodlad argues ushers in “the naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization” (12), lies a split between home and away that dramatizes the questions over sovereignty at the heart of the Victorian imperial enterprise. The Eustace Diamonds consolidates this emerging, experimental naturalism, adding caustic critique of the emergence of a bureaucratic empire.

In chapter 5 Goodlad tackles Wilkie Collins's fragmented narrative in his sensational novel The Moonstone, yoking it to continued Victorian anxieties over the effect of empire on age-old ideas of sovereignty and arguing that its attention to a form of recuperative archaeology—imbued with a sense of the impossibility of recovering any story in full—presents a narrative of capitalist globalization that becomes anti-naturalistic. Strands of the focus on anti-Semitism in Trollope's critique of Disraeli emerge again in chapter 6, in which Goodlad pairs Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Eliot's Romola, arguing for the existence of a transnational genre of adultery fiction that problematizes Britain's place in the European literary system of the late century. This discussion is followed by a compelling chapter on E. M. Forster's “queer internationalism” that we might easily find in A Passage to India, but that Goodlad identifies much earlier in Where Angels Fear to Tread, providing evidence of Forster's long-held and complex ambivalence towards the liberalism with which he has been associated.

In the final chapter and the coda Goodlad brings the argument up to date, in turn analyzing the renewed attention to seriality (and its relation to global capital) in television drama and sketching out current debates about historicization. It is in these chapters that we find most clearly expressed the presentism (strategic or otherwise), expressed in the form of exhaustive recourse to current debates in the field of Victorian studies, that haunts the book throughout. In engaging various and sometimes unrelated arguments about politics, ethics, form, and reading practices (among other topics), Goodlad has produced a book that surveys a large number of recent developments in Victorian and wider literary studies, sometimes speaking more to the state of the field of study than to the literary objects around which the book is ostensibly structured.

Any book that attempts to address the visibility of global structures in literature necessarily confronts a familiar question of its own methodology—how can any one book or author capture the complexity of the globe and the book within it? One answer might be to go the route of Distant Reading by aggregating vast amounts of data about literary production across the world literary system. Another (but not the only other) option might be to identify and closely examine those texts that seem to offer an instance of a formal or thematic engagement with emerging but still invisible globalization. Goodlad appears, at first blush, to choose the latter of these options, structuring her chapters around individual novels or pairs of novels, but at the same time the book is curiously short on close readings. Instead, Goodlad approaches the objects of her study through constellations of adjacent arguments, producing in the process a hybrid of close and distant readings, which seem to work by aggregating the close readings of others into a survey of readings of each novel. In the coda, Goodlad maps out this hybrid methodology by describing the way that the book seeks a via media between distant, close, symptomatic, reparative, and surface readings, but this reader is left wondering if it really is possible for one book to capture what is, undoubtedly, a geopolitical aesthetic in the Victorian era. Perhaps the contemporary, stand-alone, critical monograph is as incapable of exposing the structures of globalization as the nineteenth-century realist novel was once thought to be.