There has been many calls to “undiscipline” Victorian studies in recent years. For many scholars, such an undisciplining would involve, first and foremost, rethinking Victorian studies’ privileged geographies and inherent Eurocentrism, by opening it up more fully to the global scale on which the British Empire operated in the Victorian era.[1]
Accordingly, this panel attempts to situate British literary production within a world system, and also tries to go beyond that initial premise and to decenter Britain in its analyses. In other words, it tries to offer working examples of what Victorian studies look like when one tries to abandon a Eurocentric orientation.
Sezen Ünlüönen will preside over the discussion. Each speaker will be allotted 18 minutes for the presentations, leaving ample time for discussion afterwards.
Matthew Potolsky’s “Decadence as World Literature” argues that Decadent texts from semi-peripheral and colonial regions did not circulate in the way that the most familiar contemporary theories of World Literature would predict. Although many canonical Decadent texts were translated, he argues, the movement had its most significant influence through the circulation of smaller parts and fragments. This made Decadence (both the movement and the historical theory) available to world writers as a point of reference or tool of critique rather than a doctrine to be punctiliously followed.
Meanwhile, Kyle McAuley’s “Fiction as World Literature: Frederick Marryat’s Oceanic Realism” turns to sea adventure fiction of the early nineteenth century as a site in which an international and racially diverse group of characters function as a way to respond to debates over slavery and imperial racialization. Ultimately, he argues that the use of realist techniques to ascribe personhood to the formerly enslaved and to cast those persons as productive British imperial citizens comprises an essential chapter in a properly global history of realism.
Finally, Sezen Ünlüönen’s talk “Fatma Aliye: An Ottoman Theory of World Literature” turns to a literary encounter between the Ottoman novelist, Fatma Aliye and Australian novelist, Jessie Couvreur, an encounter in which both women functioned as ambassadors of their imperial cultures. Reading their parallel accounts of the same encounter side-by-side, she argues that while Couvreur fails to go beyond Orientalist tropes, Fatma Aliye’s account functions as an implicit theorization of ideal cross-cultural encounter, that is not based on translation and mediation, but that insists on reciprocity, and an ability to speak to the Other in her own language.
In sum, all three panelists are explicitly situating the Victorian Britain and its literary production in a global system of cultural and economic exchange, nuancing our accounts of global literary history and challenging our understanding of the hierarchies between the center and the periphery in productive ways.
[1] See, for instance, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, “Introduction: Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 3 (2020): 369–91.