In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.

This essay uses a case study of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and (1876-1924) to argue for an approach to world literature called “reading distance.” Through a close reading of Lin Shu's and translations of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) into Chinese and Arabic and a consideration of their work as translators and intellectuals, the essay reads between peripheries—places like Cairo and Beijing—to understand how intellectuals in those places grappled with difficult questions concerning translation, language reform, and changes in reading publics. By thinking with models of distant reading but also engaging with materials that are usually excluded from those models, the essay examines an important point of overlap in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Arab and Chinese enlightenments of the early twentieth century.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3B5CF1310737E8276BB36318034C8C5C/S0030812900200679a.pdf/div-class-title-reading-distance-port-louis-cairo-beijing-div.pdf

Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing

Anthony Trollope and the Risorgimento

How did the emigration of nineteenth-century Britons to colonies of settlement shape Victorian literature? Philip Steer uncovers productive networks of writers and texts spanning Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to argue that the novel and political economy found common colonial ground over questions of British identity. Each chapter highlights the conceptual challenges to the nature of 'Britishness' posed by colonial events, from the gold rushes to invasion scares, and traces the literary aftershocks in familiar genres such as the bildungsroman and the utopia. Alongside lesser-known colonial writers such as Catherine Spence and Julius Vogel, British novelists from Dickens to Trollope are also put in a new light by this fresh approach that places Victorian studies in a colonial perspective. Bringing together literary formalism and British World history, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature describes how what it meant to be 'British' was re-imagined in an increasingly globalized world.

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature : Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire

Wandering through Guilt. Cain’s Archetype in the Twentieth-Century Novel (1940-1960)

When the enigmatic Dick Datchery arrives in Cloisterham in the fifth part of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he asks the waiter at the Crozier Hotel where he might find a “‘fair lodging for a single buffer.’” “‘Something old is what I should prefer,’” he says, “‘something odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient [...] anything Cathedraly, now’” (202–3; ch. 18). In his whimsy, Datchery lights upon a cluster of adjectives that could easily describe the novel he inhabits. As the Inimitable’s final work, Edwin Drood is “venerable:” we seek, or indeed demand, evidence of Dickens’s creative maturity among its pages. But it is also an “odd” and exhilaratingly “inconvenient” novel, unfinished at Dickens’s death, pushed “out of the way” in frustration by those seeking categorical answers to the questions it raises. Finally, it is conspicuously “architectural,” with a profusion of strange spaces and insights into the complexities of the nineteenth-century property market. This essay puts forward three perspectives on space in the novel.1 I begin by exploring Dickens’s use of rented spaces to push Edwin Drood’s mystery plot forward; lodgings and hotels perform a narrative function in his embryonic detective story. In the second section, I move away from literary form to suggest that he sets up an intrinsic relationship between space and feeling. His scenes in London’s Staple Inn, in particular, are a profound meditation on living alone and loneliness and show him to be a subtler student of the emotions than he might get credit for. The final section considers the ways in which the novel’s politics are articulated through space. Throughout, I draw upon the ideas of a range of theorists, because Dickens’s own observations

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Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Citations

Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing

Anthony Trollope and the Risorgimento

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature : Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire

Wandering through Guilt. Cain’s Archetype in the Twentieth-Century Novel (1940-1960)

"Venerable, Architectural, and Inconvenient": Rented Spaces in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

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