Our papers respond to the recent call for “widening” the nineteenth century to other languages and frameworks, including lesser-studied sources outside of postcolonial adaptations of Victorian works that unwittingly still uphold a logic of imperial and peripheral languages (Banerjee, Michie, Fong 2021). In doing so, we explore different languages that destabilize a sense of Victorian studies as a singular, fixed method, moving beyond a center-periphery model that frames the world around the British Empire.

This special session, by centering translation and language, is particularly timely. While special issues and journal reviews over the past decade have considered similar questions since about Victorian studies—“Victorian Internationalisms” (Goodlad and Wright); “Victorian Cosmopolitanisms” (Agathcoleous and Rudy); “Globalizing Victorian Studies” (Joshi); “Victorian World Literatures” (Mukherjee); and “Globalizing the Victorians” (Assael)—our post-pandemic moment in 2023 has witnessed pressing calls from global scholars to reevaluate our disciplinary value. Thus, our session responds to recent turns in the field, especially calls to “undiscipline Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee, Christoff, Wong 2020), and to seek a “multilingual Victorian transatlanticism” (Reeder 2021). In response, we suggest that questions of translation offer alternative ways of “worlding” that celebrate multilingualism, while also recognizing the incompleteness or failures within the notion of “world literature” itself (Apter, Cheah, Damrosch, Spivak, Sun).

To secure ample time for discussion and Q&A, our session presider Olivia Loksing Moy will strictly limit each of the four papers to 10-12 minutes, leaving more than 20 minutes for discussion and questions from our audience.

Our session begins with Jacob Romanow’s paper, which discusses the term “Victorian” as a “provincial” concept rather than as methodology, using examples from Toru Dutt and Ghalib’s translated poetry. By examining how Victorian studies has institutionally been calcified as a method, rather than a set of objects, Romanow argues that the interplay of a “global network” of multiple literary traditions can effectively center our objects of study over methods, loosening the self-regarding perpetuation of “discipline.”

Building off of Romanow’s global framework, Waiyee Loh’s paper theorizes her approach to “world literature” as a mode of examining texts in relation to transimperial networks. By reading Park Chan-Wook’s Handmaiden (2016) as a film that transposes the Victorian Britain of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith to 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, Loh challenges the center-periphery model of Neo-Victorian adaptation, proposing that “triangulating” multiple locations and histories allows us to decenter our discipline’s narrow focus on Britain and its formal empire.

While Loh’s paper explores transimperial networks in a recent film, Sungmey Lee’s paper examines South Korea’s gendered canonization of Victorian fiction in world literature collections for girls, a popular phenomenon that steadily grew after the Korean War alongside the rise of publishing presses specializing in global literary translation. Lee suggests that the concept of “Victorian” girlhood circulated beyond the English-speaking world, especially in works like Jane Eyre and Little Women, under the guise of educating the “liberal” female reader in anticommunist Korea. Tracing the formation of “world literature” through a gendered canon for middle- and upper-class South Korean schoolgirls, Lee shows how literary translation disseminated puritan ideals during the Cold War, essential to the nationwide civilizing mission against communism.

With a similar focus on world literature’s political implications, Oishani Sengupta further explores the question of “widening” the field through translation and transmediation. By reading Kaliprasanna Singha’s Hobson Jobson-packed Bengali satire Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (1861, trans. 2008) alongside Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007), Sengupta argues that characters who “squint at empire” by staring blurrily and looking askance invoke new patterns of power and resistance. By tracing alternative forms of visuality in multilingual print culture, Sengupta suggests that we can identify new temporalities of critique shaped by instant, rather than delayed, modes of responses to the imperial eye.