Description
How did realist fiction 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 duree history, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic explores these questions from the standpoint of 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 the category of "sovereignty" at multiple scales and in diverse contexts, Lauren M. E. Goodlad 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 which a supposedly universalistic liberalism had helped to generate. The material occasion for the Victorian era's rich realist experiments was the long transition from an informal empire of trade that could be celebrated as liberal to a neo-feudal imperialism that only Tories could warmly embrace. The book places realism's geopolitical aesthetic at the heart of recurring modern experiences of breached sovereignty, forgotten history, and subjective exile. The Coda, titled "The Way We Historicize Now", concludes the study with connections to recent debates about "surface reading", "distant reading", and the hermeneutics of suspicion.
About the Author
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar and Professor of English and Criticism & Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
Reviews
The relationship between past and present is a pressing one throughout her book...Throughout, Goodlad reads the Victorian novel as a "vital resource" (241), its lessons ongoing, its reach still very much felt today * Carolyn Lesjak, Simon Fraser University, Victorian Literature and Culture *
Lauren Goodlad's bold and compelling book asks us to revise what we think we know... Authors and works...emerge afresh in this compelling new account of realist form and the emergence of a truly global capitalism. At a moment in which Victorian Studies has been energized by debates that have seemed to polarize...historicism and presentism, Goodlad's book--in its range from Agamben to Zizek, The Prime Minister to Mad Men--is a brilliant and bracing corrective. * Ruth Livesey, Nineteenth-Century Contexts *
Historicism, as these theoretically intricate and historically detailed readings of the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic attest, is in Goodlad's hands never a form of antiquarianism. The relationship between past and present is a pressing one...; the longue duree of the history of capitalist globalization and the various efforts on the part of nineteenth-century writers to capture the particularities of their own moment...require that criticism attend to both, that its tools be as nimble and discerning as the texts themselves... Goodlad's analyses also further Jameson's commitment to the pedagogical value of aesthetics... read[ing] the Victorian novel as a "vital resource" (241), its lessons ongoing, its reach still very much felt today. * Victorian Literature and Culture *
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic is an important and exciting addition to our understanding of the global character and transnational contexts of nineteenth-century literature. Lauren M. E. Goodlad's new study traverses and integrates ongoing conversations on literary form, political theory and cultural analysis to show how nineteenth-century realism grappled with capitalist globalization. * Nirshan Perera, Dickens Quarterly *
Lauren Goodlad's work shows how archives change when we think in terms of the global ... Goodlad also makes newly vital to the field texts that have been historically understudied or recently neglected ... Her brilliant analysis of the Mad Men episode 'The Wheel' [demonstrates] the show's surprising, revelatory investments in Victorian concerns and aesthetics ... 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. * Tanya Agathocleous, Victorian Literature & Culture *
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic brilliantly demonstrates that Victorian fiction articulated a sophisticated awareness of the world historical processes of capitalist expansion. With its masterful integration of social and political theory, Victorian politics, feminist theory, and ethics, this book will put Goodlad at the center of debates about Victorian realism, cultural politics, liberalism, and the relation between social theory and literary form. * John Kucich, co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820a1880 *
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic enriches our view of Victorian realism by challenging the notion that the British novel becomes a stagnant backwater, cut off from history. Those who concern themselves with closing the gap between literary structure and cultural analysis will want to read this lucid, cogent, and illuminating book. * Harry E. Shaw, author of Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot *
Goodlad undertakes nothing less than a complete rethinking of the realist tradition, extending it toward modernism and the era of serially-driven televised media in which we live now. The sweep and scope of this work is breathtaking, both in its commitment to the recently challenged tactics of close reading and in its investment in twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory. * Robert D. Aguirre, Victorian Studies *
Working within a theoretical framework built upon Fredric Jamesons notion of the geopolitical aesthetic and Carl Schmitts ... treatment of sovereignty, Goodlad complicates the relationship between liberalism and imperialism and sees realism not as a formally dull mirroring of a national moment but as an experimental exploration of globalized, transnational places, people, and powers. * Jeffrey Cox, Studies in English Literature *
Provides a masterful overview of the debates surrounding historical methodology since
Book Information
ISBN 9780198797616
Author Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Format Paperback
Page Count 364
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 564g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 20mm
About the Author
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Kathryn Paul Professorial Scholar and Professor of English and Criticism & Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana.
Reviews
The relationship between past and present is a pressing one throughout her book...Throughout, Goodlad reads the Victorian novel as a "vital resource" (241), its lessons ongoing, its reach still very much felt today * Carolyn Lesjak, Simon Fraser University, Victorian Literature and Culture *
Lauren Goodlad's bold and compelling book asks us to revise what we think we know... Authors and works...emerge afresh in this compelling new account of realist form and the emergence of a truly global capitalism. At a moment in which Victorian Studies has been energized by debates that have seemed to polarize...historicism and presentism, Goodlad's book--in its range from Agamben to Zizek, The Prime Minister to Mad Men--is a brilliant and bracing corrective. * Ruth Livesey, Nineteenth-Century Contexts *
Historicism, as these theoretically intricate and historically detailed readings of the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic attest, is in Goodlad's hands never a form of antiquarianism. The relationship between past and present is a pressing one...; the longue duree of the history of capitalist globalization and the various efforts on the part of nineteenth-century writers to capture the particularities of their own moment...require that criticism attend to both, that its tools be as nimble and discerning as the texts themselves... Goodlad's analyses also further Jameson's commitment to the pedagogical value of aesthetics... read[ing] the Victorian novel as a "vital resource" (241), its lessons ongoing, its reach still very much felt today. * Victorian Literature and Culture *
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic is an important and exciting addition to our understanding of the global character and transnational contexts of nineteenth-century literature. Lauren M. E. Goodlad's new study traverses and integrates ongoing conversations on literary form, political theory and cultural analysis to show how nineteenth-century realism grappled with capitalist globalization. * Nirshan Perera, Dickens Quarterly *
Lauren Goodlad's work shows how archives change when we think in terms of the global ... Goodlad also makes newly vital to the field texts that have been historically understudied or recently neglected ... Her brilliant analysis of the Mad Men episode 'The Wheel' [demonstrates] the show's surprising, revelatory investments in Victorian concerns and aesthetics ... 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. * Tanya Agathocleous, Victorian Literature & Culture *
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic brilliantly demonstrates that Victorian fiction articulated a sophisticated awareness of the world historical processes of capitalist expansion. With its masterful integration of social and political theory, Victorian politics, feminist theory, and ethics, this book will put Goodlad at the center of debates about Victorian realism, cultural politics, liberalism, and the relation between social theory and literary form. * John Kucich, co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820a1880 *
The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic enriches our view of Victorian realism by challenging the notion that the British novel becomes a stagnant backwater, cut off from history. Those who concern themselves with closing the gap between literary structure and cultural analysis will want to read this lucid, cogent, and illuminating book. * Harry E. Shaw, author of Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot *
Goodlad undertakes nothing less than a complete rethinking of the realist tradition, extending it toward modernism and the era of serially-driven televised media in which we live now. The sweep and scope of this work is breathtaking, both in its commitment to the recently challenged tactics of close reading and in its investment in twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory. * Robert D. Aguirre, Victorian Studies *
Working within a theoretical framework built upon Fredric Jamesons notion of the geopolitical aesthetic and Carl Schmitts ... treatment of sovereignty, Goodlad complicates the relationship between liberalism and imperialism and sees realism not as a formally dull mirroring of a national moment but as an experimental exploration of globalized, transnational places, people, and powers. * Jeffrey Cox, Studies in English Literature *
Provides a masterful overview of the debates surrounding historical methodology since
Book Information
ISBN 9780198797616
Author Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Format Paperback
Page Count 364
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 564g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 20mm
