The Global Circulation of Victorian Actants and Ideas in the Niche of Nature, Culture, and Technology

Abstract

Copyright © The English Language and Literature Association of KoreaOpen access journalThis article considers implications for Victorian Studies suggested by recent developments in the fields of world literatures and globalization. It considers the global scope of Victorian literature as an actant in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also the specificity of each local environment and moment of transculturation. It makes a methodological intervention on behalf of interdisciplinary and intercultural studies by providing a framework to address two current problems. First, how may we, in language and literature studies, best study global processes of modernisation, democratization, and liberalization without losing the specificity of the local? Second, how may we best study the uniqueness of distinct locales where the forces of tradition and modernization meet? If the first problem requires translators and transculturalists who know literary history and history of genres, the second requires the disciplines relating to environment: nature (natural sciences), culture (the humanities), and technology (social sciences, engineering, and medicine). The actants include Victorian geopolitical ideologies such as individualism, collectivism, nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism; geopolitical institutions and state apparatuses such as modes of government, trade, legal systems, and armed services; and geopolitical commodities and technologies such as transport and sanitation systems, around which lives and literatures are built. Case studies come from modern Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese literatures. (216/250