The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience by Lauren M. E. Goodlad (review)

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic is an important and exciting addition to our understanding of the global character and transnational contexts of nineteenth-century literature. Lauren M. E. Goodlad’s new study traverses and integrates ongoing conversations on literary form, political theory and cultural analysis to show how nineteenth-century realism grappled with capitalist globalization. Goodlad explores how the “fictional experiments” of Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Gustave Flaubert in the nineteenth century, as well as E. M. Forster in the early twentieth century, demonstrate “how realist fiction altered in its multiple efforts to craft aesthetic forms receptive to the dynamism of a fast-globalizing world” (2).

Goodlad conspicuously redeploys Fredric Jameson’s term for how filmic texts engage with complex modern and postmodern international social realities. She re-positions and re-inscribes the “geopolitical aesthetic” in a primarily Victorian context to reveal how the realist novel – far from being “politically stagnant” and “formally antinomistic and circumscribed” (10) – was geopolitically responsive and, indeed, fluid in its aesthetic interface with the global.

Though Dickens is not a central focus of the study, references to Dickens and his work are threaded throughout The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic. In her first chapter, for instance, Goodlad summarizes how recent critical discussions of works such as Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit illuminate Dickens’s strong geopolitical awareness. In her discussion of the adulterous geopolitical aesthetic, Goodlad also treats Dombey and Son as a “geopolitically acute business novel […] that makes broken marriage intrinsic to its addled landscapes, alienated social relations, and stultified family bonds” (173). Goodlad’s reflection on how contemporary television productions build on a Victorian serial-publication aesthetic also includes a brief but engaging consideration of the overtly Dickensian aspects of The Wire, David Simon’s critically acclaimed urban-crime drama.

Goodlad’s re-readings of nineteenth-century novels work to “recognize the globally-inflected spatialities, textures, and experiences that pervade nineteenth-century literature” (33). For instance, Goodlad argues that Trollope’s writing from the 1850s onward, working with his “unique penchant for dialectics between genres,” pivots productively from “quotidian provincial novels to far-flung travel writings” and from “perceptions of England’s sovereign rootedness” to an increasingly threatening “colonial cosmopolitanism” (66). Whereas the earlier Barsetshire novels “figure an England imbued with a still palpable ethico-cultural richness,” Trollope’s later Palliser novels enact “naturalistic narratives of capitalist globalization” on “sites of breached sovereignty and spatio-temporal annihilation” (82).

Trollope’s later novels, Goodlad argues in her reading of The Prime Minister, particularly “seek to isolate the pernicious effects of capitalist globalization in the figure of the Jew, that archetypal foreigner” (83). His work with silenced and subaltern colonial stories and characters in novels like The Eustace Diamonds, Goodlad asserts, additionally suggests the presence of a geopolitical unconscious signing what cannot be fully articulated. Trollope’s surprising formal experimentation with character and theme in the Palliser novels, in fact, is embedded in vital topical political and imperial debates, Goodlad argues – a reading, that runs counter to a grasp of Trollope as a so-called plodding and formally uninspired novelist.

Goodlad’s reading of Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone explores how these mystery novels work with a geopolitical aesthetic that “pulls disavowed histories to the fore” while articulating a “crisis of experience” more commonly associated with literary modernism (113). Both novels, she argues, illustrate the “formal and political dynamism” and “heightened global consciousness” of post-Indian Mutiny British fiction through repressed plotlines featuring slavery or colonial conquest, racially hybrid characters, and multi-voiced narratives (114). While Trollope’s naturalistic narratives are animated by anxieties of breached sovereignty, Collins’s work reaches towards an “almost postmodern notion of sovereignty as porous and pluralized” – thus his experimental novels engage in a “quest for integrated histories of transnational experience” (14).

Goodlad’s chapters demonstrate the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic working in a variety of ways – her reading of Eliot and Flaubert’s...