Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century, by Regenia Gagnier

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century by Regenia Gagnier Daniel M. Stout (bio) Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century, by Regenia Gagnier; pp. xiv + 247. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, $89.99, $59.99 paper, $69.99 ebook. The praise arrayed on the first pages and back cover of Regenia Gagnier's Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century uniformly portrays it as a sweeping methodological renovation: "a compelling new method" (Amanda Anderson qtd. in Gagnier xi), "a major methodological reconfiguration" (David Amigoni qtd. in Gagnier xi), "a completely new beginning, world-shaped and world-scaled, for Victorian studies" (Steven Connor qtd. in Gagnier). It is therefore on the question of method that I will concentrate our attention. Some of the assembled opinions refer to Gagnier's method in terms to which she herself gives prominent place, like "transculturation" (4) and "symbiology" (xii). Others use terms that are more marginal ("bibliomigrancy" [B. Venkat Mani qtd. in Gagnier 115]) or that do not appear in her study at all, like "differential reading" (Colin MacCabe qtd. in Gagnier). But in all cases the effort is to capture the expansive quality of the approach. Across seven chapters and a coda, Literatures of Liberalization moves through a vast set of geographies, political histories, and literary traditions. Chapter 1, "The Transcultural Transformation of a Field," offers the most explicit description of the project's methodology: "I bring together British, colonial, semi- post- and neocolonial, and settler literatures to take stock of one interconnected economic development of nationalisms and international competition that includes [Charles] Dickens's industrial revolution as well as [José] Martí's revolutionary Cuba" (8). It is a startlingly broad remit, and under its permissive scope subsequent chapters canvass a highly diverse set of authors and national traditions. Chapter 2, "Global Circulation and Some Problems in Liberalism, Liberalization, and Neoliberalism," looks at the impact of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) on early twentieth-century modernizers in China and India. It also surveys intersections of liberal individualism and Indigenous collectivism in East and South Asia, Central and South America, and the Arab world. Chapter 3, "Dialogical Imaginations: European Ideas of Plasticity, Freedom, and Choice in the Long Nineteenth Century," takes up Johann Gottfried Herder, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and D. H. Lawrence in order to consider "how imaginative literature has understood individual and collective freedom and choice" (62). Chapter 4 examines Anthony Trollope's reception history in England, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Russia; chapter 5 does the same for Dickens, measuring his cultural impact in Australasia, China, India, and Russia. Chapter 6 proposes that Decadence should be understood as a global and historically mobile (rather than European and fin de siècle) phenomenon. Chapter 7, "Crossed Histories: Social Formations in Friction 1783–Present," is a collection of disparate subsections: Little Dorrit (1855–57) as a "total environment" (168); the tractor in Norwegian and Indian literature; global commodities in literature (Gabriel García Márquez: bananas; Miguel Asturias: maize; John Williams: buffalo; Cormac McCarthy: cattle); and possible correspondences between Martí's revolutionary writing and George Gissing's novels. Chapter 8, "Coda on Processes of Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Anthropocene," dives into topics not previously central, arguing that sex and [End Page 284] gender are ontological facts (not just cultural constructions) and reading three novels—Sharona Muir's Invisible Beasts (2014), Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam's Love in the Anthropocene (2015), and Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013)—whose recentness, puzzlingly, is apparently no obstacle to their ability to represent "literatures of the Anthropocene 1750-present" (224). This capacious approach may reassure a Victorian studies increasingly concerned about its islanded procedures. Gagnier's book joins recent efforts to diversify or undiscipline the field by making it more international and multilingual, less hermetically historicist. Embracing these revisionary mandates, Gagnier projects a Victorian studies in which "international relations, rather than an island's literature," take pride of place (3); scholarship moves beyond the merely anglophone to become a project of "translation on a grand scale"; and the confines of historical period give way to a view of objects not according to birthdate but...