At Home [and] Abroad: Cosmopolitanism as Political Practice in George Sand and Pauline Viardot-Garcia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cosmopolitanism has been the subject of considerable recent academic inquiry, but the frequently vexed concept has never attracted much interest, to date, in French studies. Yet a cosmopolitan ethos is central to women's cultural production in nineteenth-century France and provides a valuable lens through which to consider networks of meaning and collaborative conversations across the boundaries of nations/languages/cultures. I read George Sand's Consuelo (1842-43) and the career of mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1821-1910), to whom the novel was dedicated, as interdependent expressions of women's cosmopolitanism marked by a shared vision of cross-cultural engagement with the politics of difference, mobility, and identity.