Empire: The Nineteenth Century Global Novel in English (original) (raw)

2022, Globalization & Literary Studies

This chapter will address the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization, for which empire was the constitutive ground. We will observe how the novel composed what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ that combined together human relationships and their wider contexts in communicable ways even when, as here, those contexts extended beyond the nation and took on global dimensions (Williams 1973: 158). Throughout, globalization will be taken as the incremental and unequal incorporation of non-capitalist regions of the world into the rising capitalist economies of Europe and then North America, a process accompanied by the uneven imposition of cultural, technological and infrastructural influence (Wallerstein 1996). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization through the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth unevenly and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. To capture two contrasting yet interestingly complementary views of this system, we therefore take our illustrative examples in this chapter from, on the one hand, Charles Dickens’s writing from the heart of empire in London, and, on the other, from the South African Olive Schreiner’s work set in – and mostly written from – zones of economic extraction.