Victorian Cosmopolitanism

Catalog description

Cosmopolitanism is often used today to describe an ethical commitment to world citizenship or a position of mobility and privilege (or both). This course examines the way cosmopolitanism emerged as a discourse in nineteenth-century Britain and the way it can be used to describe the formal and thematic concerns of Victorian writers. At a time when the advent of railways, steamships and telegraphs and the growth of the British Empire were making Britain seem inseparable from a wider world, writers grappled with questions such as: should local or universal concerns dominate? What does it mean to be British and part of a vast empire? Is the city a reflection of the world or of the nation? We will examine how these questions shaped and were shaped by poetry, novels, non-fiction writing and visual culture.