Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes An alternative way of understanding the relationship between late-nineteenth-century Brazilian literature and the minor literature of mid-nineteenth-century Britain is to frame both out in the sympathetic framework of Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minor literature, in their estimation, is precisely that which arises in the midst of History in a peripheral position—either because it is written in an uncommon language, or in that it borrows, adapts or destabilizes the literary traditions of the national space it operates within. Either way, minor literature deterritorializes hegemonic modes of form and representation in a way that subverts them, and elaborates an alternative genealogy of genre. While it operates in the dominant language and expresses a familiar reality to its contemporary readers, it nevertheless does so with an irony that subverts these representations. It is an insurgent text located within the canon that critiques the very genre that defines canonicity in its era (bourgeois European realism). The complex form, as many critics have noted, of Cranford is crucial to a reading of its significance. The form of the novel is complicated—it began its life as an offhand sketch, “The Last Generation in England,” which relates many of the discrete comic moments that later appear in the Cranford sequence. Thus, the novel has problems with keeping itself to itself, of generating and maintaining a coherence that could transcend the periodical, serial nature of its initial publication and leverage it into the generic form of the novel. As Margaret Croskery notes, “Twentieth-century criticism finds itself in a … compromised position” vis-à-vis its eclectic composition in its attempt to defend Cranford by “seeking to emphasize the novel's narrative strength and to defend it from charges of ‘plotlessness’ or, even worse, lack of unity” (200). See Slavoj Žižek's remarks on the 2008 financial collapse in his recent work, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, in which he adapts his conclusions from The Parallax View to celebrate the literal collapse of fictive capital. Julie Fromer remarks in her book A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England that tea was so pervasive and internalized in Victorian society that few, if any, commented on its true foreignness (1). Tea, associated as it is with a woman's domestic labor, has the force of dense cultural, historical, and materialist significance: it “both elides and affirms boundaries between labor and leisure, working class and middle class, England and empire, colony and postcolony,” she suggestively argues (301). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJames ArnettJames Arnett received his PhD in English at the City University of New York (CUNY) GGraduate Center. His dissertation was entitled “Eliot's Spinoza: Realism, Affect, and Ethics.”