Victorian Studies on the Continent of Europe

Abstract

Victorian Studies on the Continent of Europe In recent discussions of the future of Victorian Studies as a field, the relations between the British 'Victorian Age' and its European equiv-alents has emerged as an urgent topic of investigation. Witness, in2005, the international conference on 'Victorian Europeans', organized jointly by the Victorian Studies Centres of Exeter University,and Royal Holloway, University of London; and Martina Lauster's remarkable Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and its Physiologies, 1830–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), which illustratesthe powerful attractions of a pan-European approach to urbanization, journalism, and the production of social and scientific knowledge as sources of a 'grammar of modernity'. In this spirit, and with a view to extending a pan-European dialogue about the study of the nineteenth century, the JVC undertook to survey the present state of Victorian Studies in a range of continental European nations. The diverse results are set out below, in our roundtable format. Some contributors(such as Piotr Juszkiewicz on Poland) emphasize the historical and ideological attachment to particular dimensions of the VictorianStudies canon (in the case of Poland, Ruskin and later Aestheticism); other contributors (such as Marysa Demoor on Belgium) emphasize the regional dynamism of a research culture; while still others (Adina Ciugureanu on Romania) focus on university pedagogy as a 'feeder' of new directions in research. The first five perspectives (Belgium, France, Italy, Romania and Sweden) present profiles in Victorian Studies where literature, or literature and culture, are in the disciplinary ascendancy. The perspective from Germany illustrates the way in which historiography has become the focal point for organizing knowledge about the nineteenth century, while for Poland art history and aesthetic theory has played an important role in the reception of BritishVictorian culture. Ed. Copyright © 2007 Edinburgh University Press