Journal

In the nineteenth century, as today, people communicated ideas through a vast range of media. This was the era of cartoonists like Emmanuel Poiré, picture journals like Punch and Eshimbun Nihonchi, the invention of the phonograph, and a flowering of puppet and lantern theater around the world. Many of these media conveyed messages and stories from the past, from Gustave Doré’s The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Russia, arguably the world’s first graphic history, to wayang histories of Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib and other Muslim figures, to ground-breaking data visualizations by W. E. B. DuBois, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Joseph Minard. Similarly, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature the unusual and alternate ways in which contemporary scholars depicted and interpreted the nineteenth century: descriptive maps, comics, data and architectural visualizations, experimental histories, and speculative biographies that mirror the richness of the nineteenth-century world. Reflective essays that engage with issues in the creative rendering of history are also welcome.

Submissions for this section should present and analyze unpublished textual or visual documents that fit the aims and scope of the journal. If not in English, they should be translated, but original versions may be included when appropriate. Other formats such as roundtable discussions of one or more documents will be considered. For all proposals, the word count should be at least 2,000 words (including footnotes) and should not exceed the length of a standard journal article.​

Nineteenth-century colonial, industrial, and modernizing technologies accelerated the global circulation of objects. Block-printed textiles from Gujarat and Coromandel catered to the Indonesian and Thai markets. Cartier, Baccarat, and other Euro-American luxury houses engaged Asian royalty in design discussions to craft new editions of jewelry, toiletries, and tableware. Sightings of rare species such as the Rafflesia arnoldii in Sumatra led to worldwide dissemination of actual or pictorial samples for scientific study. Teeming with traders, designers, informants, and scholars, these thoroughfares of the market, catalogue, journal, and exhibition reinvigorated objects with new visual, material, and contextual ideas. As a result, whether natural, hand-crafted, or machine-produced, objects travelled far beyond their place of origin to experience intermixing and transformation. Submissions to this section should address this latter process of transculturation and its cross-border dynamics; we encourage scholars at the same time to augment the constituency of transcultural objects by looking beyond established taxonomies and genres.

Historians who study the nineteenth-century world are heir to a set of conceptual tools forged by intellectuals in a small part of that world. While euromethodologies have proven illuminating, much historical evidence has been cast aside without good reason, while the lived experience, truths, and knowledges of diverse peoples have been downgraded as “belief.” What alternative ways of doing history have been relegated to the shadows by our discipline’s post-Enlightenment assumptions? Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature “History from Beyond”—interventions that seek to open up new questions or approaches beyond disciplinary norms, beyond humans, and beyond euromethodologies. We especially welcome submissions that seek to challenge the core assumptions of Western modernity, close the gap between Western constructions of the past and wider-world realities, decolonize and Indigenize historical storytelling, or more seamlessly integrate non-Western epistemologies, the unknown, or the mysterious into historical narrative.

This section explores reinterpretations of the Victorian period, whether they manifest in the forms of critical editions, neo-Victorian fiction, film, theatre, music, or visual arts. The Victorians were well aware of the complexities inherent in reading and representing their own times. George Gissing, for instance, wrote his seminal study of Charles Dickens (1898) in Siena, Italy, in which he stresses how removed Dickens’ age is from his: “The time which shaped him and sent him forth is so far behind us, as to have become a matter of historical study for the present generation; the time which knew him as one of its foremost figures, and owed so much to the influences of his wondrous personality, is already made remote by a social revolution of which he watched the mere beginning.” In sum, the geographical, historical, cultural, social, and literary distance between the two writers empowers Gissing with a kind of bifocal perspective: “to regard Dickens from the standpoint of posterity; to consider his career, to review his work, and to estimate his total activity in relation to an age which, intelligibly speaking, is no longer our own.” Gissing’s concerns anticipate many of ours as we variously reinterpret the nineteenth century. For this section on “Reinterpretations,” articles that offer individual case studies that examine the recovery of texts or that further theoretical work on adaptation, Steampunk, or the Victorian afterlife are equally at home.

In rethinking the nineteenth century in global terms, a refocused attention must be paid to the periodical press which has often been figured as a vehicle for increasing democratic freedoms, in its portrayal as the “fourth estate.” This section encourages the submission of articles, roundtables, research reflections, pedagogical interventions and other critical-creative writings that bring new and cross-cultural understandings to existing ideas of such terms as the “global,” “international,” “provincial,” “local,” “transnational,” “colonial,” and “cosmopolitan” in relation to nineteenth-century periodicals. These innovative perspectives will help us to critically re-evaluate the currency of many well-used concepts and to stimulate new directions in periodicals research, as well as in the field of nineteenth-century studies.