Chapter 5 engages with a larger transhistorical discourse of female personhood, considering how the challenges that accompanied Austen’s public status are echoed in the reading and reception history of Mansfield Park. I move this discussion back to the 1772 Mansfield Decision, and forward to consider the controversy surrounding the far less momentous twenty-first century decision to place Austen on a British bank note. The open-ended, improvisatory, and uncontrollable nature of feelingly impactful speech links cultural and critical conversations to what J.L. Austin calls the perlocutionary realm of performative language. Perlocution, the dimension of language that most signals organizational breakdown, bogging down the progress of J.L. Austin’s official speech-act theory, is also the dimension or capacity of language through which paratextual literary encounters – allusions, conversations, revisions, and eventful readings – persist. This concern with doing things by our words as well as in them evokes a central feature of the enterprise of literary criticism altogether, I argue. For Cavell, the very mood and project of criticism is praise open to rebuke.

This chapter surveys the histories behind differentiation in colonial governance, rooted in the politics of colonial conquest from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It begins with an explanation of the East India Company as a mercantile enterprise with few commitments in the governance of India. Challenges to the Company’s trading prerogatives led to the conquest of eastern and northern India, yet the illegibility of indigenous society and fears of peasant rebellion fashioned governance arrangements which empowered proprietary elites, who served as key intermediares between the colonial state and society. In much of southern, central and western India, however, threats to the colonial enterprise from indigenous state-building projects, like Mysore and the Maratha confederacy, led to significant conflict and a variety of different arrangements: significant state intervention into rural society and relations with cultivators, as well as the affirmation of different types of princely states. The chapter concludes with the extremes of state presence and absence: in metropolizes and in political agencies on the frontier of state authority.

The chapter analyses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization. Taking Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) as case studies, we make two main points: first, that empire formed the constitutive ground of processes of globalization in the period; and, second, that realist fiction provided a means through which these processes could be understood and questioned, from vantage points both metropolitan or northern (Dickens) and peripheral or southern (Schreiner). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization throughout the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. Taking illustrative examples from Dickens in the heart of the Empire and Schreiner at a zone of peripheral extraction, the chapter captures two contrasting yet complementary literary responses to this system.

In England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, festivals expansively run the gamut from celebrations of flowers, seasonal harvests, and food and drink to the fine arts, music, theatre, and religion, in locations ranging from metropolitan centres, cathedrals, public and private parks and gardens, to locales rural in the extreme. Festivals could be unpredictable, and their organisers doubtless had to navigate uncertainties and last-minute cancellations, not to mention audience reception to programming; perhaps it is that element of unpredictability that gives festivals a general air of anticipation and excitement. This chapter explores post-Second World War festival culture with examples emerging from the Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival, the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, the Cheltenham Music Festival (subsequently renamed the Cheltenham Festival of Contemporary British Music), the Three Choirs Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, and the Festival of Britain. The chapter also considers the intersections of the postwar socialised Arts Council funding for music and the arts in the British Isles, and the disparity between funding for metropolitan and rural centres.

This chapter focuses on the efforts of corporate leaders, welfare professionals, and working families in West Coast defense cities during World War II who struggled to accommodate children and build communities in two significant West Coast shipbuilding cities: Richmond, California, and Vanport, Oregon. The war offered a combination of public and private resources and support for policy makers, professionals, and industrialists alike to test designs for future environments that served workers and families and that they hoped would mitigate the looming threat of juvenile delinquency. This chapter argues that the postwar obsession with young people’s health and environments found early and important expression in these new material conditions. In Richmond – but especially in Vanport – corporate and federal cooperation reshaped ideals and material forms of housing, employment, and child welfare in one subsidized package that would long endure. For diverse families who migrated for work, the defense worker communities were often their first encounter with a new urban industrial life, heightening their expectations for the future for their children, even if many would eventually be systematically excluded from it.

As is well known, London became an important literary headquarters for a number of now major literary figures who migrated to Britain after World War II from the Caribbean; many of these were to become formative in the evolution of a black British canon. Whilst the presence of these artists in the metropolis of London has commonly been linked to a literary renaissance which began to transform the parameters of the ‘English’ novel, less attention has been paid to how the bi-focal vision of writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, and George Lamming not only articulated a wider-angled vision of modernity but posited alternative metropolitan imaginaries and aesthetics. Focusing primarily on fiction, this essay demonstrates how the respective and distinct experimentations of these writers with form and voice began to reshape the cultural and literary map of the nation, at the same time interrogating its narrow (and often parochial) borders.

Decadent artists and writers in the second half of the nineteenth century were fascinated by the chaos and thrill of modern life, but they were to a much greater extent disgusted by the impact of so much social and cultural change. Baron Haussmann transformed Paris in the 1850s and 1860s into a booming metropolitan marvel, but in Les fleurs du mal (1857) Charles Baudelaire evokes the city as both spectacle and spectre. 350,000 people were displaced to the outskirts of the city during this period as new commercial sites replaced the medieval streets and alleyways. In this chapter, the development of the concept of decadence as a critique of urban progress is traced via Baudelaire’s foundational collection of poems and its influence on other writers, like Théophile Gautier, Émile Zola, and Joris-Karl Huysmans whose novel À rebours (1884) evokes the spiritual wasteland and psychological alienation that are the advance of modernity.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.