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).Footnote ¹

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 Reference Goodlad and Julia2007); an issue of this journal on “Victorian Cosmopolitanisms” that I co-edited with Jason Rudy (September Reference Agathocleous and Rudy2010); and a special issue of the Yearbook of English Studies on “Victorian World Literatures,” edited by Pablo Mukherjee (July Reference Mukherjee2011). 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.

How has Victorian studies been affected by these arguments? And how have various global contexts been understood by those who have engaged these debates, now that the main question for many critics is not whether to depart from the national paradigm but how best to do so? What are the problems and possibilities built into concepts like “global,” “comparative,” “transnational,” and “geopolitical”? What methodologies and epistemologies are entailed by these keywords, and how can work with a wider geographical scope preserve the historical exactitude that underwrote the global turn in the first place?

Because there are now so many books that represent versions of what might be called “Global Victorian Studies,” I focus here on five recently published texts that represent both significant contributions to the field and different ways of understanding and analyzing the global. Antoinette Burton's Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, a collection of her essays from the mid-1990s onwards, engages pivotal historiographic issues and controversies in the field of empire studies. The Victorian World, edited by Martin Hewitt, is part of a “Routledge Worlds” series on an eclectic range of literary and historical eras, such as the Gothic and the Etruscan. Each volume in the series is a hefty reference work that surveys important historical and cultural contexts for its subject. In the Victorian volume, the “world” of the title underscores both the anthology's interdisciplinary nature and its investigation, according to Routledge, of “the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies.” Hewitt's anthology thus offers an opportunity to assess a large-scale interpretation of the shape of the field in relation to these issues. In contrast to the scale of The Victorian World, but no less ambitious in its efforts to comprehend the domestic and global together, Lauren Goodlad's The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic is a single-authored literary-critical monograph that re-examines the novel form through the lens of Victorian geopolitical categories such as empire, free trade, and liberalism.

Two books by Mary Ellis Gibson, Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology, published simultaneously by Ohio University Press, bring the academic monograph and anthology form into fruitful conversation. Her anthology is a collection of English language poetry published in India over the course of the long nineteenth century, while her monograph provides a critical framework for reading this material – much of it unknown to the field – by showing how dialogues, exchanges, and networks among British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian poets in the colonial period produced a distinctive Anglophone tradition. Employing different key terms and embodying different genres of academic publication, these five books, looked at together, provide a sense of the multiple directions in which the field is being extended by the global turn and of the challenges and rewards yielded by their formal and theoretical choices.

Burton's essays in Empire in Question offer a convenient point of entry into an investigation of the global turn, for they encapsulate significant debates and questions at its heart. One of these concerns the viability of the category of the global itself. As I use it in this essay, and as it is commonly used in the field, the term “global” serves as a convenient but problematic shorthand for a wide range of overlapping but non-identical issues and contexts (e.g., imperialism, globalization, and transnational comparison). What most troubles Burton about the global turn in Victorian and empire studies, though, is that it is often as reductive as the national model, because of the assumption that “the global impulse was a presumptively English/British impulse and the empire, a major delivery system for that ambition in world history” (278). In the book's coda, therefore, she argues that we might more fruitfully examine the dynamic among the different imperial forces that were in play in the nineteenth century (such as the Russian, German, and Japanese ones, with which Britain was in competition). She also calls for more attention to transimperial phenomena such as anti-colonial movements, as well as circuits that cut across imperial ones altogether, like those examined under the auspices of Indian Ocean studies. For Burton, thinking in truly global terms entails making cross-imperial as well as cross-colonial connections, while acknowledging how “empire's global character was ever in flux, rarely fully articulated, perpetually in need of reiteration” (279).

Along the lines of this argument, the essays in the first half of her collection push against unacknowledged biases and absences in the field of imperial history. In particular, Burton positions herself – in bracingly combative terms – against historical empiricism, professing agnosticism about the possibility of knowing the past and emphasizing instead the importance of knowing ourselves: of being scrupulously aware of how the politics of location “inform the subjects we teach and the objects we consolidate as imperial” (23). An essay on “Archive Stories,” for instance, looks at the way feminist historians often have to think creatively about what counts as an archive and read against the grain of traditional ones, while another on “Gender, Colonialism, and Feminist Collaboration” engagingly demonstrates how critical historiography might be built into the classroom. By co-teaching a class that pitted top-down against bottom-up approaches (looking at state-based vs. subaltern power) and that compared British, Indian, and African histories, Burton and her colleague, Jean Allman, were able to illuminate for their students the significance of different critical approaches while covering a much wider range of transnational ground than would be possible in a single-instructor classroom.

The second part of book turns to case studies of what Burton calls “critical imperial history” and demonstrates Burton's contribution to feminist as well as empire history. Beginning from the premise that “historians have been slow to see and to recognize the impact of empire on ‘domestic’ history” (257), many of these essays look at how British feminists such as Mary Carpenter, Josephine Butler, and Charlotte Brontë relied on the imperial imagination to construct a domestic terrain upon reformist principles. In the book's “Afterword,” historian Christopher Bayly commends Burton's work for this characteristic refusal to be celebratory about the recovery of women's history, as well as her insistence on thinking in transnational terms – and against the grain of the metropole-periphery model – long before these methodologies became common features of the field. To those in literary studies, a discipline less riven by the battle between empiricism and skepticism that still characterizes historiography, Burton's essays may seem overly invested in a hermeneutics of suspicion that has recently fallen out of favor. Yet this collection is a reminder of the value of suspicion as a mechanism for changing what counts as history, and indeed literature, while retaining and enhancing a complex sense of the past: one epitomized by the rich precision of Burton's work, the absences it brings into view, and the political stakes it consistently illuminates.

When the key term changes from “empire” to “world,” in the case of The Victorian World, at least, the global context gets murkier. As an encyclopedic anthology designed to offer a broad overview of a specific field, the volume seeks to provide a sense of the state of current knowledge in the field about Victorian Britain: in relation to this agenda, “world” means something like “milieu” or “age.” Thus the book presents an impressive range of synthetic, information-packed essays on core topics such as “Economics and Society,” “Politics,” “Knowledge and Belief,” and “Culture,” fleshing out in nuanced and up-to-date terms the national picture that anthologies on the period have traditionally provided. On the other hand, the volume also strives to leverage the ambiguities of the word “world” in the series titles and examine not just the Victorian milieu but also global topics. Because it starts with a conventional national framework, however, it necessarily runs the risk of the kind of reductivism Burton indicts, whereby globalization and other global phenomena are represented as outgrowths of developments in Britain rather than inter-national and inter-imperial processes. The first section, for example, entitled “The World Order,” contains essays that look at a variety of global topics – such as empire, the shrinking of the world via technological advances and intensified global networks, industrialization, free trade, and emigration – almost exclusively from the perspective of British history, thus giving the impression that the “world order” and Britain are synonymous. The last section, on “Varieties of Victorianism,” is more transnational in scope, for it examines how the category “Victorian” or aspects of Victorian society and governance affected other parts of the world, such as India, the settler colonies, and North America. Interesting topics covered here range from the education of Anglophile Mexicans at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire to the engagement of “Afro-Victorian” writers such as Alexander Crummell and Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther with the work and ideologies of Victorian sages such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold.

Strangely, the two essays that engage global contexts in the most ambitious terms are located in the sections focused more squarely on Victorian Britain. Alan Lester's “Race and Citizenship” shows how an understanding of nineteenth-century political subjecthood in Britain depends upon a global frame that takes in the spaces of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as settler colonies, and Ireland and India; abolitionism, the widening of the franchise in Britain, the demands of settlers for self-government, and the rights of indigenous people in colonial territories, he argues, were all mutually inflected. Jonathan Rose's “The Global Common Reader” briefly but cogently traces the rise of a mass reading public around the world as well as in Britain. Challenging Pascale Casanova's thesis about the cultural imperialism of French and British publishing, Rose argues that readers in other countries “appropriated and adapted Western literature to their own cultures, and used it to fertilize the growth of their own national literatures” (556). Hence while books with wide global circulation were often British and French (and sometimes Russian), Rose uses recent research on book history in different parts of the world to show how European texts were received in unexpected ways; Isabel Hofmeyr's work on the global circulation of the Pilgrim's Progress, for example, demonstrates that Bunyan's allegory was widely translated into African languages and often read as “a metaphorical denunciation of slavery, imperialism, and white supremacy” (562).

If The Victorian World strains the meanings of “world” in its title, Hewitt also wants to put pressure on the word “Victorian”: not so much to open it up, however, as to shore it up against those who have taken issue both with the periodization of Victorian studies and with the sense of “monarchical agency” (2) associated with it. In his introductory essay to the anthology, he argues that Victorians had a strong sense of themselves as such and also takes issue with the long-standing division of the period into binary or tripartite sections of “early,” “middle,” and “late,” arguing instead that the period can be seen to have four distinct phases. While he points to the arbitrariness of the existing sub-divisions, and musters up a wealth of historical evidence in favor of his own, adding “the Victorian Entr’acte” of the late 1860s to mid-1880s to the more familiar early, mid- and late periods, his periodizing efforts do not depart significantly from conventional wisdom on the topic or engage in much detail with the global contexts that most trenchantly call this wisdom into question; thus domestic political events rather than foreign ones (such as the Opium Wars, the Indian Rebellion, or the subsequent crowning of Victoria as Empress of India) structure his chronology, even though the latter might stake an equal or greater claim on the shape of the period, depending on one's focus within it. Because of this, and the uneven balance between local and global scales in the anthology in general, the volume seems to give shape to the growing pains of the field as it tries at once to thicken and develop our traditional contexts and contours, and to stretch them out to take in the unwieldy and disorienting “world.” It is because of this, as well as in spite of it, that The Victorian World is an interesting and valuable addition to existing anthologies.

By carving out a distinct literary-historical context that departs in notable ways from previous organizational paradigms, Mary Ellis Gibson's monograph Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and her Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology manage to seem like something new altogether. For one thing, the books are unusual because they depend upon each other for their meaning, thanks to the nature of the content they delineate: an Anglophone poetry tradition produced in India over the long nineteenth century by British, Anglo-Indian, and Indian writers of the period. Though some of these writers, like William Jones and Rabindranath Tagore, are well-known in the field, many are not: the pseudonymous Anna Maria, for example, or Kasiprasad Ghosh, or Mary Eliza Leslie. Because, as Gibson argues, poetry of the imperial period has in the past been appropriated to nationalist ends in both British and Indian literary contexts, many poets who fail to fit neatly into national paradigms have been lost from view, as has the close dialogue, both implicit and explicit, they had with each other across divides of gender, class, and ethnicity. A familiar Kipling poem she anthologizes, then, can read differently in light of the poetry of Anglo-Indian women published in the same period or post-Rebellion poetry by Indian writers, or some other piece of the puzzle of contemporary poetry that Gibson has meticulously reconstructed. Her organization of material along the lines of influence, language, and publishing history (she focuses on work published in India) allows for this dialogue to come into view and makes nationalism an object of inquiry rather than the frame.

If the anthology presents this material as an invaluable new archive for use in classes and scholarship, the monograph offers a rich interpretive frame for it. Gibson points not only to the neglect of some of the lesser-known poets she publishes but that of poetry in general as a source of knowledge of the imperial period. “Poetry was the most important belletristic English form in India” (Indian Angles 3), she argues, noting that it is a particularly useful genre through which to understand the relationship among the different traditions that met and took shape within the imperial contact zone because of the dialectic between reiteration and revision that characterizes the production of poetry. The anthology's introduction also highlights themes in the poetry that she explores at length in Indian Angles. “Bardic nationalism” (a term she borrows from Katie Trumpener) is one of the most important of these, for it helps to bolster her argument that the poets she explores do not simply represent two sides of a metropole-periphery divide; instead, a “transperipheral” relationship between them can be detected, whereby both Indian and Anglo-Indian poets attempt to carve out new identities using the trope of the bard, just as Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers did in the eighteenth century. While her work focuses on writing in English, then, Gibson stresses the complex vernaculars that inflect the language; “to imagine the ‘sound’ of English in Calcutta in this period accurately is to imagine the language not of Oxbridge but of Burns,” (Indian Angles 21) she notes. Other themes that link the very different poets her work knits together include the use of paratext to situate and legitimize themselves and make themselves legible; the deployment of mimicry as a tool both of affiliation and recalcitrance; the trope of exile and unhomeliness; as well as a range of different forms of community that mitigate the estrangement of writing poetry in English in India – her work traces connections of both filiation (as in the case of the Dutt Family Album) as well as affiliation (as exemplified by the cosmopolitan friendships of Sarojini Naidu and Rabindranath Tagore).

Indian Angles also provides important information about English language education, reading practices, and print culture of the period to flesh out the context in which the poetry she has anthologized circulated; while carefully researched, this section feels overly compressed. Though there has recently been an explosion of information about book history in colonial India, there is not yet much on the Anglophone poetry archive that Gibson has reconstructed and more of it would be useful for a fuller understanding of the import of the poems she discusses, especially if it appeared at the beginning of the study (most of it is amassed in Chapter Three). Another moment that makes one yearn for more comes in the last chapter, about Tagore, in which Gibson argues for the influence of translation practices and transnational poetic circulation on British modernism. “To write free verse or prose poems,” she argues, “English language poets wrote as if they were translating from Asian languages” (Indian Angles 261): a tantalizing observation that makes one wish for a sequel study focusing exclusively on modernist poetry.

This sense of being offered only a small window onto an immense field of knowledge is one of the risks Gibson takes in producing this kind of ground-breaking work, however, and her introduction to both the monograph and the anthology take care to delineate the limitations of her project. For instance, she acknowledges the problem of looking at English-language poetry in isolation from the larger context of poetry in Indian languages produced in the same period, despite the importance of this context to many of the Indian poets she anthologizes, as well as to Orientalists such as William Jones. Yet the care with which Gibson meticulously reconstructs the complex transnational historical and literary contexts for the poetry she does focus on, along with her insightful close readings, makes one appreciate the necessity of the kind of delimitations she has chosen and grateful for the signposts she leaves to other archives and historical pathways she is herself unable to travel.

If Gibson's work shows us what we don't yet know of the nineteenth-century literary world by creating a new archive, Lauren Goodlad's work shows how the archives we do know change when we think in terms of the global, or to use her more precise term, the “geopolitical.” The title of her book, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic, riffs on Fredric Jameson's The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World-System and in doing so addresses itself both to the field of Victorian studies and to broader debates about aesthetics and politics in literary studies. At the level of the field, Goodlad aims to show how a wide range of Victorian texts (by Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert) exhibit a geopolitical aesthetic, using realism in imaginative ways that are responsive to, and illuminating of, the contradictions, strictures, and evil freedoms of capitalist globalization in its nineteenth-century incarnations. Drawing on her expertise in liberalism and governmentality, Goodlad engages in equal measure with theory, history, and literature, thus providing new ways to read the engagements of Victorian realism and Victorian liberalism as mutually inflected and global in outlook; her insights about shifting imperial policies from the mid- to late-nineteenth century and their interaction with liberal politics, for example, are not yet common knowledge in the field despite its long-standing interest in imperialism.

Though the literary texts surveyed in her work will be more familiar to Victorianists than those in Gibson's publications, Goodlad also makes newly vital to the field texts that have been historically understudied or recently neglected, such as Wilkie Collins's Armadale, or Eliot's Romola, or E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, or Anthony Trollope's whole oeuvre, for that matter. Individual close readings, meanwhile, bring into view a “geopolitical aesthetic” along synchronic and diachronic axes. Her brilliant analysis of the Mad Men episode “The Wheel,” for example, demonstrates the connection between Mad Men's use of the past and its relation to contemporary neoliberalism, but also the show's surprising, revelatory investments in Victorian concerns and aesthetics.

Goodlad also addresses the discipline of literary studies as a whole, partly by extending the notion of the “Victorian geopolitical aesthetic” to a reading of Forster and serial TV shows such as Mad Men, but mostly by engaging in a sustained, rigorous way with current methodological and theoretical debates. Reaching beyond conversations in Victorian studies to draw on criticism in modernism, postcolonial, and transatlantic studies, as well as theory more broadly, Goodlad explicitly takes on the recent “surface/depth” debate that has pitted historicist, “suspicious” reading against sociological, descriptive, and “ethical” reading. Though she addresses this debate in the introduction and throughout the book (demonstrating her own investments through her readings and her allegiance to Jameson, who is identified with the “suspicious” side of the debate), her coda is particularly effective in showing how the debate relies on a false dichotomy that does not do justice to the way criticism is actually practiced by those ostensibly on either side of the divide, or to their overlapping ethical and political investments. Her book thus provides a salutary corrective, both in theory and in practice, to a growing impasse in the discipline.

In this way, Goodlad's work also demonstrates that one of the most valuable aspects of a geographically expansive conception of Victorian studies is the imperative for scholars to address themselves not only to the world outside Britain but to fields and disciplines outside our own – another kind of opening out which puts pressure on our scholarly expertise. One solution to this showcased by a number of these works is collaboration. The co-joining of expertise on display in an anthology like The Victorian World, or the co-teaching experiments of Burton and Allman, or even the interplay between Gibson's monograph and her anthology, are all ways that scholars might redress the gaps in knowledge that a broader sense of the field opens up. If one of the risks of expanding the scale of our work is the sense of vertigo that accompanies the absence of boundaries and a heightened sense of the artifice of boundaries when we encounter them, each of these works demonstrates that even when the scale seems off – the balance between local and global skewed – the disorientation that ensues is both powerful and empowering, moving us to new vantage points from which we can see what’s missing.