"Until recently, literatures were studied separately by nation"

July 24, 2020 11:28 AM

@Bigger6Romantix (7/23/2020, Twitter), "Looking for a great (and free!) teaching resource? Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of British, American, and Canadian Literature 1767–1867 (eds. Lance Newman, Joel Pace & Chris Koenig-Woodyard) is now online!" [as a PDF from 2006--"a #Bigger6-inflected" 2nd ed. is planned]. Somewhat related: Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, Amy R. Wong (LA Review of Books, 7/10/2020), "Undisciplining Victorian Studies": "This essay challenges the racism that undergirds Victorian Studies and maintains it, demographically, as an almost entirely white field"; and Nathan K. Hensley (blog, 7/21/2020), "The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th Edition: Volume E, The Victorian Age. Reader's comments": "Any anthology freezes into solidity a certain vision of the field of inquiry it delimits. So what is the vision of the field marked out by the Victorian Norton's 10th edition?"
posted by Wobbuffet (3 comments total)

such a fantastic set of resources
posted by PinkMoose at 9:56 AM on July 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

The reader's comments by Nathan Hensley point to many people to learn about:

Jamaican Scottish nurse Mary Seacole (1805 - 1881).

Bengali poet-translator Toru Dutt (1856-1877):

Life struck me with fright -
Full of chances and pain,
So I hugged with delight
The drudge's hard chain;
One must eat, - yet I die,
Like a bird with clipped wing,
Sing - said God in reply,
Chant poor little thing.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:01 AM on July 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

From Hensley's comments on who was part of the Victorian age and whose intellectual legacies are defined in spite of their imperialist white supremacy?

Yet as the headnote to the Empire section tells us, there were some 400 million nonwhite Victorians, far more than lived in England, for example – yet these experiences have only glancingly been construed under the heading Victorian. It is excellent to see the excerpt from Ruskin on Turner’s Slave Ship, since this selection at least indexes the absence of (e.g.) Black perspective as an absence. But in the too many pages of Carlyle that open the book, there’s no selection from the author’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” none of his pumpkin-eating “negroes” beneath trees, none of his many statements in favor of genocide in Jamaica (though these are alluded to in the headnote). This whitewashed Carlyle, while “a violent conservative or, as some have argued, virtually a fascist,” appears here, despite all that, in his old habiliments as Victorian Sage: “a man of letters…who strove tirelessly to create a new spiritual and political philosophy adequate to the age”.

posted by spamandkimchi at 10:05 AM on July 25, 2020 [1 favorite]