The Global 19th Century

Though the nineteenth century novel is widely credited as the model and inspiration for much of the most exciting global fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries, readers looking in the novel for the global interconnectedness of people and events will often assume that it was only after 1900 that novelists were capable of making such connections outside the borders of their nations or, therefore, recognizing the way distant places are bound up in what is happening to their characters at home.  After all, where are the realist novels that talked about the Irish Famine, a world-historical catastrophe that was happening a stone’s throw from Britain’s shore?  And if even Ireland was too far, what about India or the Caribbean? There is, however, a global dimension to the literature of the 19th century, and a non-negligible one. This seminar will explore the international side of 19thcentury classics like Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Middlemarch while also bringing into the conversation outstanding but neglected masterpieces like Multatuli’s novel about Dutch colonialism in what is now Indonesia, Max Havelaar, and Tolstoy’s final work of fiction, the novella Hadji Murat, which deals with the Russian conquest of what is now Chechnya in the 1840s.  It is coming to be recognized that the concept of “world literature,” which was born in the 19th century and discussed by Marx and Engels, demands attention to world history as well. But which history?  What does 19th century literature look like when it’s considered in its global context? In its attention to the novels and secondary readings on its syllabus, the seminar will also ask what world history world literature needs.