Introduction and Keywords

What might the exploration of Victorian internationalisms contribute to literary study in an era acutely focused on its own globalizing momentum? That question motivated a series of panels devoted to the topic at the fourth annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association at Purdue University in September 2006. The original idea was to extend and reflect on the turn in Victorian studies away from insular nationalist frameworks and toward the embrace of terms such as internationalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and geopolitics. The impulse was not to query a presentist outlook in recent scholarship but, rather, to advance the work of developing historicist perspectives. For while it has become important to recognize the limitations of “Victorian” in designating a coherent field of inquiry, and to acknowledge the tendency of such rubrics to reproduce the ontology of the sovereign nation-state, it is also true that, for all its immediacy, the capitalist globalization that is ongoing today was visibly underway for Charles Baudelaire, Lady Augusta Gregory, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Makepeace Thackeray—to name just a few of the writers whose works are discussed in the papers collected here. To capture the global provenance of Victorian literature is, potentially, to advance historical understandings of globalization as well as transnationalized modes of literary study. But is internationalism a felicitous term through which to prosecute such endeavours? The word “internationalism” was coined in the late eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham to describe international jurisprudence, “the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations” (296n). Since that time it has been used to characterize relations and processes that are “existing, constituted, or carried on between different nations” (OED). As Perry Anderson writes, “internationalism” may describe “any outlook, or practice, that tends to transcend the nation towards a wider community, of which nations continue to form the principal units” (6). “Internationalism” is, in this sense, clearly transnational for it has the potential to readjust critical perceptions of the nation-state. Whereas nation-centric theories may posit the state as sovereign monad and the nation as homogenous culture, an internationalist standpoint evokes contingent spaces of social, politico-economic, and cultural interaction—including the importance of non-state actors. But while such an outlook decenters the nation, stressing movement across rather than consolidation within borders, it is not, as some theorists might prefer, either post-national or even anti-national. Although an “internationalist” outlook recognizes the nation-state as the product of transnational, translocal, regional, and postcolonial conditions of possibility, it does not further assume that such contingency either does, or should, obliterate the materiality of nation-states or obviate their potential efficacy as one political structure among many. To be sure, whereas “transnationalism” as defined by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan emphasizes “the asymmetries of the globalization process” (“Global” 664; cf. “Introduction”), internationalism of the kind celebrated by many Victorians takes British hegemony for its starting point. Thus, an 1862 article in Blackwood’s describes the International Exhibition of that year as a “congress of the nations” for a “world” depicted as simultaneously “a stage,” “a mart” and a “battle-field” (472-73)—even as such “friendly rivalry” is characterized as the setting for Britain’s continuing “supremacy” (472, 479). Clearly, the study of Victorian internationalisms entails rigorous denaturalization of the nineteenth century’s imperious (Eurocentric, Anglocentric, racist, Orientalist) discourses on the global. But in thus submitting what might be called the “actually existing” internationalisms of the Victorian era to critical scrutiny, scholars need not conclude that concepts of internationalism offer no critical purchase for today’s postcolonial and transnational modes of literary criticism. Thus, Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever use “inter-national” to …