The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic

Abstract

How did realist narrative alter in the effort to craft forms and genres receptive to the dynamism of an expanding empire and globalizing world? Do these nineteenth-century variations on the “geopolitical aesthetic” continue to resonate today? Crossing literary criticism, political theory, and longue durée history, this book explores these questions from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth-century novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Anthony Trollope, as well as successors including E. M. Forster and the creators of recent television serials. By looking at “sovereignty” at multiple scales and in diverse formal, geographic, and historical contexts, the book shows that the ideological crucible for “high” realism was not a hegemonic liberalism. It was, rather, a clash of modern liberal ideals struggling to distintricate themselves from a powerful conservative vision of empire while striving to negotiate the inequalities of power along lines of race, gender, nationality, and ethnicity, which a supposedly universalistic liberalism had helped to generate. The material occasion for the mid-Victorian era’s rich realist experiments was, thus, the transition from an informal empire of trade that could be celebrated as “liberal” to a neo-feudal imperialism that only Tories could warmly embrace. In this way the book places realism’s “geopolitical aesthetic” at the heart of recurring modern experiences of breached sovereignty, forgotten history, and subjective exile.

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