The Literary Machine”. The Victorian Case for World Literature

December 9, 2024

👤Author

Name: Anthony TELLO
Affiliation: : Rutgers University, USA
Contact: art153@english.rutgers.edu

📄Article

Citation Recommendation: Tello, Anthony. “The Literary Machine”. The Victorian Case for World Literature”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 7-24
Pages: 7-24
Language: English
URL: https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/1_Tello.pdf

Abstract

Victorian Literature as World (building) Literature grants a privileged view of the often-violent linkages across space and time characteristic of empire and its aftermath, as well as the struggle to create new worlds out of it. Expanding Pheng Cheah’s conception of World Literature, I argue that Victorian Literature not only world-ed extractive capitalism, which came to dominate the globe, but simultaneously attempted to re-world alternatives through characterization and the realist mode. Indeed, many Victorian characters were themselves deeply critical of and unsatisfied with the world-system of capitalist extraction being created. The novels I choose to focus on, George Gissing’s New Grub Street and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, support this claim by demonstrating critiques and resonances in their attempts to expose and break free from the extractive capitalist constraints of the imperial and neo-imperial period, making both an archive to study the conflicts entailed in the ongoing process of worlding extractive capitalism. Thus, I will claim a space for the study of the 19th Century as mid-wife to globalized extractive capitalism that links, rather than compartmentalizes, life on the planet into a violent system of wealth generation and exploitation, which has culminated in the present moment’s many crises in climate, politics, economics and so many other arenas.

Key-words: Victorian novel, Extractive Capitalism, Postcolonial, De-Humanization,  G. R. Gissing, early-Large Language Model

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