Literatures of Liberalization

Regenia Gagnier has held chairs at Stanford University, USA, and the University of Exeter, UK, where she is Professor of English Language and Literature. She has held fellowships at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Oxford, and the Guggenheim, and Visiting Professorships at British Columbia, Delhi, Leeds Trinity, Melbourne, Oxford, and Vanderbilt. She is author of Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986); Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (1991); The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (2000); Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole 1859-1920 (2010) and many edited collections and articles.

“Gagnier’s book offers a genuinely broad comparative perspective on the circulation of Victorian and Anglophone ideologies, social movements, ideas, authors, literary motives and forms, and on the ways in which they migrated to China, Japan, India, Russia, and Turkey, among other countries … .”  (David Fishelov, Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Vol. 19 (2), June, 2021)“There can be no doubt that Gagnier articulates some important new questions that will further nineteenth-century comparative studies. Readers of world literature and comparative literature, literary or book historians on transculturation and globalisation, and researchers with an interest in how the long nineteenth century can be viewed as globally interactive (intertextually, contextually, and paratextually) will profit immensely from this book.” (Yuejie Liu, BAVS Newsletter, Vol. 20 (1), 2020)

• 1. The Transcultural Transformation of a Field.- 2. Global Circulation and Some Problems in Liberalism, Liberalization, and Neoliberalism.- 3. Dialogical Imaginations: European Ideas of Plasticity, Freedom and Choice in the Long Nineteenth Century.- 4. Trollope’s Modernity: Speed-up, Stress, and Resentment in the Public Sphere.- 5. The Global Circulation of Charles Dickens’s Novels.- 6. Global Literatures of Decadence.- 7. Crossed Histories: Social Formations in Friction.- 8. Coda on Processes of Sex, Gender and Desire in the Anthropocene.