Literatures of Liberalization

This book traces the global circulation of cultures and ideologies from the technological and democratic revolutions of the long nineteenth century to liberal and neoliberal modernity. Focussing on moments of coerced (colonial and postcolonial) and voluntary contact rather than national boundaries, the author draws attention to the global scope of literatures and geopolitical commodities as actants in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also to the distinctiveness of each local environment at its moments of transculturation. Based in extensive experience in collaborative, multilingual, interdisciplinary networks, the book synthesizes existing theoretical scholarship, provides original case studies of world-historical Victorian and modern writers, and articulates a new interdisciplinary methodology for literary studies in a global context. It will be of interest to Victorianists, modernists, comparatists, political theorists, translators, and scholars of world literatures, world ecology, and globalization.

“Gagnier’s book offers a genuinely broad comparative perspective on the circulation of Victorian and Anglophone ideologies, social movements, ideas, authors, literary motives and forms, and on the ways in which they migrated to China, Japan, India, Russia, and Turkey, among other countries … .”  (David Fishelov, Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Vol. 19 (2), June, 2021)

“There can be no doubt that Gagnier articulates some important new questions that will further nineteenth-century comparative studies. Readers of world literature and comparative literature, literary or book historians on transculturation and globalisation, and researchers with an interest in how the long nineteenth century can be viewed as globally interactive (intertextually, contextually, and paratextually) will profit immensely from this book.” (Yuejie Liu, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 20 (1), 2020)

“Through a series of gripping case-studies Regenia Gagnier shows how the forms of Victorian liberal and modernizing thought have continued to unfold and be vigorously reimagined in many different cultures across the world. Keen-sighted, quicksilver-fleet, flexible and generous in scope, Literatures of Liberalization shows the centrality of bibliomigrancy to the global exchanges of peoples, passions and powers. Regenia Gagnier has done nothing less than mark a completely new beginning, world-shaped and world-scaled, for Victorian Studies.” (Steven Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK)

“To call Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century the most comprehensive and daring materialist critique of “world literature” to date would only capture part of its achievement – for Gagnier, one of our finest scholars of history, literature, and culture, animates the material archive with flesh andblood, desire and need in this remarkable tour de force.  At the nexus of this all is the very idea of being together.” (David Palumbo-Liu, author of The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age)

“This is a tour de force. Regenia Gagnier uses the differential reading of the Victorian classics across the globe as a way of mapping how liberalism, a philosophy of the development of the individual self, morphed into liberalization, the process of economic modernization, and then into neo-liberalism, the reduction of all values to those of the market. This is the way the world thinks.” (Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh, USA)

“Literatures of Liberalization is a remarkable piece of research, long in the thinking, reading and making. Regenia Gagnier's career interests in economics, nineteenth-century literatures and the politics of liberal subjectivity, as well as her deep commitment to scholarly collaboration across borders of all kinds (linguistic, geopolitical, disciplinary), is the perfect grounding for this powerful re-think of the global circulation of Victorian writing. Here, in a major methodological reconfiguration, Victorian literature itself becomes a complex and powerful actant in the cultural co-creation of our globalised modernity.” (David Amigoni, Professor of Victorian Literature and Pro Vice-Chancellor, Keele University, UK)

“This stunning transnational study, attentive to the interaction and interdependence of world movements, sweeps from 19thC global liberalisms to the re-mediation of modernisms in different world cultures. From the circulation of crucial commodities to desire and sexuality, Gagnier shows how the symbiology of the anthropocene affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Dickens, Trollope, Dostoevsky, Herder, D. H. Lawrence, Huysmans, Su Tong, Knut Hamsun, Gabriel García Márquez, Jiang Rong, are among the writers dazzlingly re-read.” (Isobel Armstrong FBA, Emeritus Professor of English (Geoffrey Tillotson Chair), Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

“At once an irreplaceable guide to Victorian writing’s global transits and a meditation on liberal thinking and feeling, Gagnier’s book illuminates a rich and complex future for the study of nineteenth-century literature. Ardent, provocative, and intellectually generous, it confirms the value of attending to texts’ transculturations—not only how they change when translated but also how they adapt to new cultural environments and alter those environments in turn.” (Douglas Mao, Johns Hopkins University, USA)

“Regenia Gagnier’s Literatures of Liberalization advances a compelling new method for global literary studies, tracking processes of “transculturation” in the movement of literatures and ideas across geographical and historical contexts.  A major contribution to our understanding of the long nineteenth century as well as to the literary history of liberalism and neoliberalism.” (Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English, Brown University, USA)

Regenia Gagnier has held chairs at Stanford University, USA, and the University of Exeter, UK, where she is Professor of English Language and Literature. She has held fellowships at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Oxford, and the Guggenheim, and Visiting Professorships at British Columbia, Delhi, Leeds Trinity, Melbourne, Oxford, and Vanderbilt. She is author of Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986); Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (1991); The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (2000); Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (2010) and many edited collections and articles.