"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 Contexts
"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 sweep and scope of this work is breathtaking, both in its commitment to the...tactics of close reading and in its investment in...critical theory...This kind of grand synthesis is rare....Readers...engaged with the realist tradition of Victorian fiction, and even more particularly those concerned with nineteenth-century seriality, wil find much to learn in this book. So will those interested in the Atlantic world system, empire, and the global...By urging a renewed engagement with historically situated forms...[Goodlad] she has done what the best criticism and imaginative work always aims to do: help us understand the way we live now." --Robert D. Aguiree, Victorian Studies
"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] 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 1820-1880
"...Goodlad knows that a geopolitical unconscious will pool as much within artistic forms as it does in their contents...[Her] close attention to the formal innovations of writers often dismissed as plodding imitators of giants like Scott or Balzac enables [her] to propose a revision of the still prevailing view of Victorian fiction...[E]ven the most emblematically of English novelistic spaces...turn out to be structurally transnational, umbilically connected to the world via the dramas of sovereignty, governance, race, portable wealth, and adulterous sexuality....Her inventions have...important theoretical consequences...Goodlad correctly connects the recently fashionable advent of 'surface reading'...to Bruno Latour's anti-humanist 'actor network theory' (ANT), which in turn is a part of Latour's decades-old feud with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu." --U. Pablo Mukherjee, Journal of Victorian Culture
"[T]hat the experience of reading the book is to feel immersed in a large structural process...is a testament to the ambition, strength, and richness fo this book. Over the course of eight chapters, a prologue, and a coda, Goodlad makes vital contributions to recent conversations about the history and discourse of liberalism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, literary form, and methodologies of reading (surface reading, distant reading, and actor network theory). Her coda alone should be required reading..." --Daniel Novak, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies
"Working within a theoretical framework built upon Fredric Jameson's notion of the "geopolitical aesthetic" and Carl Schmitt's...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, trasnational places, people, powers." --Jeffrey Cox, Studies in English Literature
"Always running well ahead of the curve, Lauren Goodlad has taken the transnational turn in style, flinging away all the usual cliches about Victorian realism and liberalism and instead giving us a 19th century refreshed and remobilized for the threats of our own time. This sharp new cognitive mapping of Victorian literature demonstrates triumphantly how international commitments, for all their ambiguities, made their unpredictable way into literary form." --Bruce Robbins, author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
"The Victorian Geopolitcal 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, Modern Language Quarterly
"... 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 19
