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Undisciplined Reading

Review products

Elizabeth Hope Chang, Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019).

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2022

Extract

In their field-shaking 2020 essay, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong set out to “think carefully and deliberately about how we can develop a truly relational thinking and set of practices that engage scholarship across fields and disciplines, enabling a cross-fertilization of ideas, a coalition-based politics and activism, and even a refashioning of academic structures to better serve the purposes of equity and justice.” Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie make a similarly powerful call in their introductory essay, “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” for a 2021 special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. This “widening” occurs across different fields and dimensions, stemming from a “wish to examine the interpretive and methodological possibilities that emerge when we expand our objects of study beyond what has been ordained by the temporal—and spatial—purview of the British nineteenth century, which is to say that we wish to put further pressure on the geotemporal linkage that has largely tethered studies of the nineteenth century to the geographic confines of Britain.” My sense is that central to these projects to “undiscipline” and “widen” the Victorian field should be a reexamining of our reading practices as scholars. What do we read, and when? Do we stick to our “subfields,” however we define these, or do we venture elsewhere? And what does it look like to read “elsewhere” while continuing to produce meaningful scholarship?

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Works Cited

Banerjee, Sukanya, Fong, Ryan D., and Michie, Helena. “Widening the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Literature and Culture 49, no. 1 (2021): 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, Christoff, Alicia Mireles, and Wong, Amy R.. “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies 62, no. 3 (2020): 369–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christoff, Alicia Mireles. Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Kornbluh, Anna, and Morgan, Benjamin. “Presentism, Form, and the Future of History.” B2o, October 4, 2016, www.boundary2.org/2016/10/anna-kornbluh-and-benjamin-morgan-introduction-presentism-form-and-the-future-of-history.Google Scholar
Neuman, Andrés. Fracture. Translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.Google ScholarPubMed
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