While cosmopolitanism has been a much debated topic over the past two decades, critical and theoretical attention it has received remains unevenly distributed. Most recent debates about cosmopolitanism tend to focus on our contemporary moment and the ways in which it was shaped by globalization. When genealogies of cosmopolitanism are attempted, they tend (understandably) to focus on the philosophical history of the concept, and when such genealogies turn to literature, their focus tends to remain decidedly Anglophone. The aim of this panel is to offer a revised, comparative account of cosmopolitan (and anti-cosmopolitan) imagination across nineteenth-century Europe.

In the early 2000s, Victorian studies have seen a significant rise of interest in literary cosmopolitanism. Inaugurated by Amanda Anderson’s 2001 The Powers of Distance, this trend has culminated in Tanya Agathocleous and Jason A. Rudy’s special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture on Victorian Cosmopolitanisms (2010). What began as Anderson’s attempt to recuperate nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism as an ethical stance characterized by “cultivated detachment” from the demands of one’s own culture, has, by 2010, morphed into a multidirectional inquiry into Victorian cosmopolitanism’s complex relationship to both nationalism and the empire, into its philosophical underpinnings, and into its many cultural manifestations, from literary works to cosmopolitan magazines and public exhibitions.

While this is certainly a welcome development to which any contemporary discussion on nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism owes considerable debts, it is also one that very much focuses on Britain as a national culture. In the present panel, we wish to reimagine nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism from a less Anglocentric perspective and to examine some of the modes of cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan thought that permeated Europe and North America. Rather than focusing primarily on fin-de-siècle developments (as most discussions of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism do), we explore the full range of the nineteenth century, from Madame de Staël and Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1800s and 1810s to Robert Louis Stevenson and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s and 1890s. Our exploration is also international and multilingual, as it examines texts written in English, French, German, and Russian. Our aim is to generate a rich and diverse picture of cosmopolitanism as a contested term and an object of intense cultural struggle across the west.

Our examination begins in the early nineteenth-century with Madame de Staël. As Trevor Sanders shows in the first presentation of the panel, de Staël is not merely a pivotal figure in European literary culture, but also an indispensable starting point for any discussion of cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century. For it was de Staël who early in the century articulated the concept of an “open nation” which stands as an important corrective to the nationalist fervor of much of European Romanticism. As Sanders shows, de Staël’s text “De l’esprit des traductions” (published in Milan in 1816) discusses the role of translation in meditating cultural encounters in a way that addresses the key questions of cosmopolitan theory, including the relationship between universal and national loyalties.

Florian Zappe, our second panelist, places nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism within the context of the crisis of religious metaphysics. Drawing on the seemingly divergent examples of Shelley, Whitman, and Nietzsche, he traces a distinctly atheist genealogy of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism which he sees as distinct from earlier forms of cosmopolitanism that were rooted in Christian moral universalism. As he argues, “these three nontheistic cosmopolitanisms are, in spite of their aesthetic and philosophical disparity, exemplary of the wider tendency in the nineteenth-century to mobilize the emancipatory potentials opened up by the crisis of religious metaphysics in opposition to the waves of nationalism that were sweeping the United States and Europe alike.”

While the first two papers of the panel explore the emancipatory potential of new forms of cosmopolitanism in the face of nationalist fervor, the second two papers focus on more unsettling visions of cosmopolitanism. Our third panelist, Whitney S. May, returns to the Anglophone context in order to examine the association of cosmopolitanism and radical otherness. Focusing on such texts as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula, May connects the rise of the monstrous doppelgänger in late-Victorian fiction to the tensions between national and transnational forms of belonging in the late nineteenth century. Because the doppelgänger is both familiar and unfamiliar—or rather, familiar but impossible to fully assimilate—it is a figure particularly well suited to examine the anxieties of a culture whose own imperial history has plunged it into a state of perpetual encounter with otherness.

Our final panelist, Aleksandar Stevic, also focuses on cosmopolitanism as a source of anxiety and examines the rise of new forms of anti-cosmopolitan discourse across nineteenth-century Europe. While the notorious phrase “rootless cosmopolitan” is best remembered as an Anti-Semitic slur from the Stalinist period of Soviet history, the construction of the “bad cosmopolitan” as figure of questionable morals and dubious loyalty to his country was an important part of both liberal and nationalist vocabulary throughout the nineteenth century. In his presentation Stevic explores the use of this kind of anti-cosmopolitan discourse by two unlikely allies from the opposite ends of Europe: George Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky. While they came to their critique of cosmopolitanism following very different trajectories—Dostoevsky through Slavenophilia and Anti-Semitism, Eliot through the slow creep of nationalist assumptions that were present already in Romola and were fully articulated in Daniel Deronda—they both articulate a rejection of cosmopolitan ideals that still rings familiar today.

Given that our panel has four participants, we have agreed to assure sufficient time for discussion by slightly shortening the presentations to approximately approximately 14 minutes as the upper limit.

Finally, this panel’s focus on cosmopolitanism speaks directly to the presidential theme of Being Human: cosmopolitanism is above all a discourse on what it means to be human and on the kinds of obligations we have to our fellow human beings. The questions explicitly raised within the presidential theme—citizenship and belonging, the challenge posed by xenophobia, the value of diverse communities—are also central concerns of cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan discourse.