The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic
Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Reviews and Awards
"The relationship between past and present is a pressing one throughout her book...Throughout, Goodlad reads the Victorian novel as a "vital resource" (241), its lessons ongoing, its reach still very much felt today" - Carolyn Lesjak, Simon Fraser University, Victorian Literature and Culture
"Lauren Goodlad's bold and compelling book asks us to revise what we think we know... Authors and works...emerge afresh in this compelling new account of realist form and the emergence of a truly global capitalism. At a moment in which Victorian Studies has been energized by debates that have seemed to polarize...historicism and presentism, Goodlad's book—in its range from Agamben to Zizek, The Prime Minister to Mad Men—is a brilliant and bracing corrective." - Ruth Livesey, Nineteenth-Century
"Historicism, as these theoretically intricate and historically detailed readings of the Victorian geopolitical aesthetic attest, is in Goodlad's hands never a form of antiquarianism. The relationship between past and present is a pressing one...; the longue durée of the history of capitalist globalization and the various efforts on the part of nineteenth-century writers to capture the particularities of their own moment...require that criticism attend to both, that its tools be as nimble and discerning as the texts themselves... Goodlad's analyses also further Jameson's commitment to the pedagogical value of aesthetics... read[ing] the Victorian novel as a "vital resource" (241), its lessons ongoing, its reach still very much felt today." - Victorian Literature and Culture
"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." - Nirshan Perera, Dickens Quarterly
"Lauren Goodlad's work shows how archives change when we think in terms of the global ... Goodlad also makes newly vital to the field texts that have been historically understudied or recently neglected ... Her brilliant analysis of the Mad Men episode 'The Wheel' [demonstrates] the show's surprising, revelatory investments in Victorian concerns and aesthetics ... She also demonstrates that one of the most valuable aspects of a geographically expansive conception of Victorian studies is the imperative for scholars to address themselves to fields and disciplines outside our own." - Tanya Agathocleous, Victorian Literature & Culture
"The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic brilliantly demonstrates that Victorian fiction articulated a sophisticated awareness of the world historical processes of capitalist expansion. With its masterful integration of social and political theory, Victorian politics, feminist theory, and ethics, this book will put Goodlad at the center of debates about Victorian realism, cultural politics, liberalism, and the relation between social theory and literary form." - John Kucich, co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3: The Nineteenth-Century Novel 1820â1880
"The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic enriches our view of Victorian realism by challenging the notion that the British novel becomes a stagnant backwater, cut off from history. Those who concern themselves with closing the gap between literary structure and cultural analysis will want to read this lucid, cogent, and illuminating book." - Harry E. Shaw, author of Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
"Goodlad undertakes nothing less than a complete rethinking of the realist tradition, extending it toward modernism and the era of serially-driven televised media in which we live now. The sweep and scope of this work is breathtaking, both in its commitment to the recently challenged tactics of close reading and in its investment in twentieth and twenty-first century critical theory." - Robert D. Aguirre, Victorian Studies
"Provides a masterful overview of the debates surrounding historical methodology since the dominance of New Historicism in the 1980s." - Eleni Coundouriotis, MLQ
"Working within a theoretical framework built upon Fredric Jamesons notion of the geopolitical aesthetic and Carl Schmitts ... treatment of sovereignty, Goodlad complicates the relationship between liberalism and imperialism and sees realism not as a formally dull mirroring of a national moment but as an experimental exploration of globalized, transnational places, people, and powers." - Jeffrey Cox, Studies in English Literature
"... Now Lauren Goodlad and Nathan Hensley offer two new ways of understanding Victorian society's commitment to expansion, conquest, and domination, and Victorian literature's commitment to staying at home. ... specialists in the Victorian era—like Goodlad and Hensley—have shown us a great deal about the way its literature reflects upon imperialism without ever going to the colonies." - Nasser Mufti, Review
