Tanya Agathocleous. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780521762649. Price: $90.00/£55.00

If it is difficult to understand the modern world, it is nonetheless desirable to do so. Speaking to this point, the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing begins Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) with a statement and a question: “Global connections are everywhere. So how does one study the global?” (1). Tsing argues that contemporary processes of globalization come properly into view via “an ethnography of global connection” attuned to the fact that world-level forces and the paradigmatic universal abstractions held to comprehend planetary interdependency find form only in practical encounters played out across the world at particular times and places. Hers is an ethnography that insists that the “universal offers us the chance to participate in the global stream of humanity” at the same time as it recognizes that to identify such a stream “we must become embroiled in specific situations,” beginning whenever necessary “in the middle of things” (1-2). In answer to her follow-up question, “Where would one locate the global in order to study it?” (3), then, Tsing turns to the Indonesian rainforests, writing about them in relation to the contingent, uneven, frictional way in which capitalist modernity takes hold in the world. In Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World, Tanya Agathocleous provides a stimulating and accomplished account of the way in which nineteenth-century urban realist writing might be understood to have engaged the epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political challenges that Tsing associates with the complexity of a globalized world. Like Tsing, Agathocleous begins her study by proposing that the Victorians were faced by an increasingly interconnected, interdependent world, a world crisscrossed “with the new and fast-expanding networks of trade, finance, post, steamship, telegraph, print, and immigration” (xv). As a result, she suggests, a range of diverse contemporary writers including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Morris, and General William Booth, confronted the question of how one might locate the global in order to give it imaginative yet tangible form, in a manner that allowed quotidian experience to be plotted in relation to an abstracted, obscured but nonetheless substantive bigger picture. These writers found their answer, Agathocleous contends, in London. And they did so, she continues, by way of “cosmopolitan realism,” a formal endeavour by which two scalar perspectives drawn from visual culture–the sketch and the panorama–were deployed in order that a visible city could stand in for an invisible world. By moving “between the fragmentary view from the street and a distant, all-encompassing overview,” Agathocleous remarks, the writers she treats could “conceptualize human community at a worldwide level” even as they tested abstracted universalisms against the embodied, diverse, and divided reality of urban capitalist modernity: “The visible world of the polis, in all its grim materiality, was a constant reproach to the invisible, idealistic world of the kosmos” (xvi). Though it turns to London rather than the Indonesian rainforests in order to ground itself in the “middle of things,” Agathocleous’s project nonetheless complements Tsing’s ethnographic injunction to place the local and the global, the material and the ideal, the particular and the universal, in dialectical relation. As becomes clear, for both formal and ideological reasons, some of these attempts can be understood to have worked better than others. Moreover, while Victorian London inspired a host of culturally pervasive efforts to “participate in the global stream of humanity,” different imaginaries cast the idea of global totality and global belonging in different lights. “Cosmopolitan realism,” Agathocleous concludes, “was both utopian and dystopian in outlook” (xvi). Fittingly for a study of nineteenth-century writing’s oscillation …