To a certain extent, the experience of reading Lauren M. Goodlad's wide-ranging, theoretically rich, historically erudite, and methodologically inspiring book is a bit like her account of the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic itself. One of the most portable and clear explanations of this aesthetic is in her description of the experience of the reader of serialized fiction: “Such narratives oscillate between the event-based temporality of the newspaper … and a longue durée that individuals cannot compass but in which they nonetheless feel themselves palpably immersed. Thus, more than a mimetic picture of ‘real life,’ what serialized realism conveys is the real-life experience of inhabiting long-evolving structures that challenge our limited capacities to grasp ongoing histories” (284). This combination of the lived, embodied, and present effects of global processes of capitalist and imperial expansion that are “fundamentally absent to individual perception” draws from Fredric Jameson's model of a “geopolitical aesthetic” in his book on world cinema (9). But while Jameson sees the nineteenth-century realist novel as “politically stagnant” (10), Goodlad argues that realism doesn't simply “reproduce or reify material realities” of global capitalism, “but capture[s] their dynamism across time and space” through “memorable formal experiments” (66). The definition of “realism” here is capacious—formally and generically diverse, encompassing Wilkie Collins's sensation fiction and George Eliot's historical fiction. This diversity extends to Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels that don't “adhere to a single genre” (89) or a novel like the Eustace Diamonds, which attempts to “realistically represent the opposite of realism” (108). Instead, the category that links these texts is what Goodlad calls the “naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization” (31). That is, the spatio-temporal dimension of a (flexible) realist form can capture the uncanny effects of transnational and trans-temporal experience.To be clear, in saying that the experience of reading the book is to feel immersed in a large structural process that can elude immediate perception, I mean this as a testament to the ambition, strength, and richness of this book. Over the course of eight chapters, a prologue, and a coda, Goodlad makes vital contributions to recent conversations about the history and discourse of liberalism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, literary form, and methodologies of reading (surface reading, distant reading, and actor network theory). Her coda alone should be required reading for scholars and students interested in debates over “the way we read now.” Writ large, one can read the entire book as a nuanced defense of historicism as a method. Even as the book as a whole is rooted in the theoretical, ethico-political debate over liberal humanism, the legacy of empire, and contemporary transnationalism, it uses “‘actually existing’ transnationality” in Victorian culture and the Victorian novel to both reframe Victorian literature's relationship to these questions and to historicize those debates (65). For example, while interested in the project of contemporary critics to model an ethical and embodied (rather than an abstract humanist) cosmopolitanism, Goodlad argues that Victorianists both ignore nineteenth-century transnationalism and too often evaluate “nineteenth-century ethics by the light of today's theories” (66). She instead asks “what the Victorian era's global genres can tell us about cosmopolitan ethico-political projects” (66). Or, while exploring the limits of liberalism's ability to explain or “authorize a stable imperial sovereignty,” she also highlights the limits of our (often oversimplified) critical discourse around liberalism and so-called “liberal imperialism,” which was “neither internally consistent nor reliably expressive of any single liberal logic or philosophy” (43). For Goodlad, not only does the realist novel (broadly conceived) capture the simultaneously embodied and abstract experience of global capitalism, but it offers the possibility to bridge the methodological gap between ethical and structural critical approaches: “understanding literature's engagement with history as both structured and subjective, geopolitical and ethical, formal and embodied” (35). In the end, Goodlad calls for a more flexible and open array of diverse methodologies (though her critique of Bruno Latour's approach as a “reduction of knowledge to the given” [291] is particularly good). Nevertheless, she models a form of historicism that is itself attentive to particularity and embodiment, textual surfaces and distances, and networks and ontologies.At the same time, Goodlad offers a sustained argument for the geopolitical richness and historical engagement of the mid-Victorian novel. Goodlad's main interlocutors in this argument are Lukács and Jameson, and the idea that post-1848 novels fail to capture the “present as history.” Focusing on a relatively narrow but important transitionary period between 1848 and the formalization of imperialism in the 1870s, Goodlad argues that “[i]t is hard to imagine a more fecund set of historical contexts for a geopolitically sensitive literature” (10). Perhaps more important, because there is not yet a “coherent image of an imperial state,” the effort to “explain” British imperialism to the British public generated a wide array of models of sovereignty and nation even within “liberal” imperialism (43)—models varying from support for “free trade” to “Greater British” white settler colonies (while rejecting non-white “dependencies”), from the discourse of the civilizing mission and abolitionist “Enlightenment universalism” and a rejection of racial essentialism, to an embrace of racialized logic for “territorial empire” (43). Goodlad's reading of these debates makes up most of chapter 2. And, while she explores the effect of the Indian rebellion and the Governor Eyre controversy, it is a lesser-known case that returns again and again as a touchstone for complex questions around sovereignty (both at home and abroad): the debate over the rights of the Rajah of Mysore—a “test case” of British assurances that they would respect the rights of India's sovereigns, even as British annexation and Westernizing agenda already undermined those rights (49). The Mysore debate over direct or indirect rule and its compromise between “modern liberal and neo-feudal conceptions of empire” (51) only enhanced liberal anxiety about “the sovereignty of a territorial empire” and the image of British progressive government on the eve of the second reform bill (51).In many ways, Goodlad's reading of George Eliot (chapter 6) captures the critical capaciousness of Goodlad's historicism, the geopolitical engagements of the mid-Victorian novel, and the formal experimentation of realism. For Goodlad, Eliot is her strongest case against Jameson's and Lukács's assumptions about the post-1848 British novel: “to a greater extent than any other Victorian-era novelist,” she argues, Eliot more fully “anticipated” and embodied Lukács's Historical Novel (182). Steeped as she is in the same “German materialism from which Lukács's Marxism derives,” Eliot argued that art was inseparable from “its capacity to capture social movement” (182). Rather than an anachronistic projection of contemporary concerns onto Renaissance Florence, Romola represents it as the “forerunner” to the mid-Victorian geopolitical experience, not only in its tacit reference to the Risorgimento but more generally as part of an ongoing historical process that allows us to see the “present as history” (177). If Eliot produces a Lukácsian historical novel, Goodlad argues that Romola is a fusion of the work of Walter Scott and George Sand. In creating a female version of the “typical character” (in Lukács's terms) of Scott's historical fiction, while transforming a “masculinist genre” (187), Eliot crosses “boundaries of gender and genre” (196).Omitting Eliot from his account of the historical novel, Lukács also ignores Eliot's role as “Victorian Britain's premiere ‘European’ author” (178). To this end, Goodlad pairs Eliot with Gustave Flaubert as co-creators of what he calls the “adulterous geopolitical aesthetic” (164). While Eliot is not usually thought of as a “novelist of adultery,” the issue “in some form shadows all of her works” (164) and of course her life. If adultery seems to have little to do with geopolitics, Goodlad argues that adultery was “both a catalyst for and frequent trope” of the “worlded state of heirloom collapse” (167). As she explores in her earlier chapters on Anthony Trollope (chapters 3 and 4), the “heirloom” political and cultural institution is immune to realist disenchantment, and outside of instrumentality and “abstract economic value” (75)—a state best embodied in Trollope's Barsetshire novels (72). This model of national rootedness, however, existed in productive tension with Trollope's extensive travel writing, which depicted the “transportable mode of proprietary Englishness” in settler colonies that anticipated the arguments of “Greater British” colonial discourse (68); this play between rootedness and cosmopolitanism is what she calls Trollope's “two-part foreign policy” (67). Trollope's Palliser novels, however, chronicle the evacuation of “heirloom” sovereignty in the face of a racialized (mostly Judaized) cosmopolitanism.For Goodlad, both Madame Bovary and Romola overlap more broadly with these narratives of “exile, alienation, and damaged sovereignty” (167). “Bourgeois” marriage is the archetypal “heirloom” institution in seemingly offering an “extra-economic and extra-juridical value” (169). In the novel of adultery, “money from elsewhere” becomes a “devastating penetration” into marriage, offering “commodified marriage, eroticized consumption, the collapse or cooptation of the heirloom's extra-economic value, and, not least, adulterous sex infused with the affects of racial contamination and existential exile” (172). Reading Romola with Madame Bovary requires contextualizing Eliot as a writer whose perspective “emanate[es] from Europe's republic of letters” (183). At the same time, Goodlad inserts Bovary back into its “nineteenth-century conditions of possibility … [a]s a naturalistic narrative of capitalist globalization which takes adulterous breach for its motive and ‘impersonality’ for its mode,” rather than simply a proto-modernist embodiment of autotelic style and an alternative to the realist novel (188–89). Against Moretti's assertion that there is “nothing” in the nineteenth-century British novel dealing with the theme of adultery, Goodlad points out that there is a fairly robust tradition of the novel of adultery in Victorian fiction. Yet, in Goodlad's reading, Tito's marital infidelity is neither the reason for Romola's decision to flee (his betrayal of “filial duty” to Bardo is the immediate cause), nor central to understanding Romola as a novel of adultery. Instead, in Romola, Eliot offers her own form of the novel of adultery—a “female Bildungsroman in which a young girl marries and is soon disabused of her ‘phantom’ love, but goes on to engage in mature ‘unions’ that enable her to participate vicariously in public affairs” (201). Based on Eliot's essay “Women in France,” in which she pictures a youthful marriage followed by mature and independent relationship, this plot extends beyond Romola with elements appearing in novels like Middlemarch. For Goodlad, Romola's discipleship under Savonarola is “structurally analogous” to an adulterous affair, while her position as the new head of Tito's illegitimate family functions as a second marriage (202).Adultery is also linked to geopolitics through Eliot's revision of Antigone. Goodlad reads Romola as an Antigonean figure who “relocates Antigone's dilemma from the sentimental terrain of marriage and adultery to the civic terrain of republican life” (196), while Romola likens her duty to that of “a world-historical leader” (199). This is a short-lived moment, which points to the “limits of the Scottian romance to accommodate a female typical character” (201). Nevertheless, it adds a “utopian dimension” to the novel—what elsewhere in the book is linked to Raymond Williams's idea of the “subjunctive mode”—a dimension that is crucial to understanding not only the generically experimental and “surreal” episode of Romola's heroic aid to rootless and plague-stricken Jews, but also the ending and epilogue, which ask us to “reinterpret the world with a legend of female experience at their disposal” (200, 203).If Romola has been read as the “least naturalistic of Eliot's novels” (184), it nonetheless anticipates other aspects of the “naturalistic novel of capitalist globalization.” Tito, a “cosmopolitan exile,” adopted from the “emerging discourse of anti-Semitism,” looks forward to Judaized, rootless figures like Trollope's Ferdinand Lopez. Yet Tito's rootlessness gets generalized into a larger “exilic condition” that attaches to Romola herself (202), especially in her temporary “drifting away” toward “existential estrangement” (203). In this respect the “adulterous geopolitical aesthetic” of Romola also offers a model through which to read Daniel Deronda—not just in figures like Lydia Glasher, or Deronda himself (a man in love with two women)—but in the novel's “exilic interiorities” (203) and its own exploration of a world of cosmopolitan alienation. In formal terms, it also attempts (and fails) to find a novelistic form (utopian romance or realism) to capture what Eliot calls (in Mill on the Floss) the “grand historic life of humanity,” which eludes us at the end of Deronda but which might be “realized in the future Daniel and Mirah set out to create” (206).Eliot's mode of Luckácsian historicism and geopolitics is obviously not the only version of the aesthetic and form that Goodlad traces. If Eliot captures the present as history, in chapter 5, Collins's Armadale “renders modern experience as the experience of suppressed world histories” through mixed-race characters who expose the “uncanny ecologies” of the Atlantic world (123). For Goodlad, Collins is the “premier novelist of a global aesthetic bent on describing transnational experience as part of an ongoing stream of history” (114), who aims to move beyond what Walter Benjamin calls “Erlebnis” (the ephemeral, disconnected, and individualized experience of modernity) to “Erfahrung,” the ability to grasp and engage with a history that extends beyond individual time and space. While Armadale ends up “retreating from history” and conjuring a “post-racial” future (132), The Moonstone at least tentatively achieves what Goodlad calls a “dark Erfahrung” (114). Its form in particular embodies a version of the geopolitical aesthetic in which experiences are “individually perceived but collectively wrought,” offering a “porous and pluralistic alternative to the model of the sovereign subject” (146, 151). Chapter 7 explores E. M. Forster's “queer internationalism” as a meditation on an embodied “ethics of care” and as a valuable contribution to the “transnational critical projects of our own day” (218). While often read as the archetypal literary liberal, Forster resists the abstract (and often implicitly hierarchical) language of a liberal universalism and its “view from nowhere” (231) in favor of an embodied ethics based on a “view from somewhere”—a simultaneously “broad-minded but carefully particularized attention to otherness: a glimpse of how embodied affect and enlarged perception may stimulate one another” (231). Like Collins, Forster's “view” is “multi-perspectival” and pluralistic but without the use of multiple narrators, striving toward and anticipating what feminist ethicists have described as “moral humility” (231–32). Finally, if “drifting away” is part of the “genetic code” (204) of Deronda, Goodlad returns to “existential drift” in her reading of Mad Men (chapter 8), with its “neo-liberal” alienation, and rootlessness, in which the contingency of identity in late-capitalism is encapsulated in a universalized condition of virtual “secret Jewry” (252). Like Trollope's foreign interlopers or Don Draper/Dick Whitman, the “secret Jew” conjures not Jewishness but “ambiguous identity” (251). In ways that bring us back to the beginning of this review, Goodlad reads the “slow-burning realist effect” of Mad Men's serialization as an example of the embodied but elusive experience of capitalist globalization (253).I have only really barely scratched the surface of this remarkable and rich book, including its simultaneously deep and detailed engagement with Victorian history, as well as with some of the most important critical and theoretical debates in contemporary scholarship across periods. While this book will be challenging for students unfamiliar with many of the currents and debates the book explores, the care it takes to explain the terms and stakes of these debates makes it all the more useful for students and scholars alike. Certainly, there are times when the phrase “geopolitical aesthetic” is used as a kind of talisman and can lose its explanatory power where explanation is most needed. But, like Mad Men's Kodak carousel slide-show, which Goodlad turns to as a “metaphor for the experience of serial viewers” (267), it rewards the backward and forward movement of rereading and careful study, even if, like the spatio-temporal dimensions of capitalist globalization and the geopolitical aesthetic itself, its totality, at times, exceeds our grasp.