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UNSPEAKABLE GEORGE ELIOT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2010

David Kurnick
David Kurnick*
Affiliation:
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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Extract

The very idea of Victorian cosmopolitanism might at first glance seem an oxymoron. Historically bracketed by a Romanticism that took political inspiration from France and intellectual cues from Germany and by a modernism whose most prominent “English” personnel were largely from overseas, the Victorians can look decidedly parochial. The most incisive recent attempts to link cosmopolitan thinking to specific formal or stylistic innovations have tended to leave the Victorians out of the picture. A recent essay by David Simpson, for example, nominates what he terms the Romantic “historical-geographical epic” as a critically cosmopolitan genre – one whose barrage of footnotes ruptures the surface of the text and ensures that even in surveying the exotic Other, Romantic epics guarantee that “the pleasure of poetry sits uneasily but inescapably alongside the burden of critique” (150). On the modernist side, Rebecca Walkowitz's Cosmopolitan Style (2006) has compellingly excavated the links between a host of modernist experimental practices and the project of thinking creatively outside national boundaries – reaching the conclusion that “there is no critical cosmopolitanism without modernist practices” (18). Neither Simpson nor Walkowitz deals with the Victorians in depth, but a certain idea of nineteenth-century realism hovers as the implicit contrast to the genres and practices they catalogue.

Type
Articles
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 489 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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