From Nation to Network

Despite exciting and influential work in postcolonial, transatlantic, and world literature, much Victorian literary scholarship continues to reproduce the logic of the nation. This essay builds on existing critiques of nation-based literary studies to make the case that it is not the nation as a place or a political institution that has most powerfully organized literary studies, but the more mystifying and troubling category of autochthony—the notion that writers and texts are linked to the land of their birth. Levine here proposes a reorientation of literary studies around a new form: the network rather than the nation. The network allows us to understand vital aspects of literary history that the nation obscures, including, paradoxically enough, the nation itself.