This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture.

This “Keywords Redux” article examines the significance of drugs (psychoactive substances) in Victorian culture and literature, theorizing their potential for both performance enhancement and for pleasure.

One way to tell the story of our discipline is as a story about reading. In the early twentieth century, in order to establish the value of literary criticism, critics used the framework of professionalism to create specialized vocabulary, professional societies, and reading methods distinguished from those of laypeople. Foundational pieces of literary criticism often pry analysis apart from the affective experiences of reading literature—our sympathy, identification, shock, or sadness. Early literary critics did so in order to privilege literature's patterns and structures to argue, implicitly or explicitly, that literature is art, not life. In other words, reading literary description isn't a substitute for experiencing sensory perception of those settings, people, or objects. Fictional characters’ affective lives—and our responses to those lives—aren't a way to understand our own subjecthood.

In the mid-twentieth century, the term environmentalism became commonly used to refer to efforts to protect the natural environment from human abuse and disrespect. Attitudes to safeguarding the environment, however, had already been taking shape for some time, based on interpretive practices that affirmed the values, needs, and desires of some people and not others, and rarely those of nonhuman animals. Changing perceptions of species, race, gender, class, and wealth influenced who had the privilege, knowledge, and opportunity to recognize abuses of nature, envision environmentalist possibilities, and act on them. Philip P. Morgan observes, for example, in a study of Caribbean ecology across centuries, that global capitalism, extractivism, and ecological dispossession have skewed which parts of the human population and the natural world have been recognized as worthy of attention and the forms this attention has taken.

This essay argues that “experience” is an essential keyword for Victorian studies. The concept spiked in interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Causes for this spike include the division of humanistic knowledge into the modern disciplines, and the pressure that idealist philosophy put on British empiricist thought. Shadworth Hodgson's 1898 The Metaphysic of Experience is featured both as a text exemplifying the paradoxes of Victorian experience-talk and as an invitation to further study.

In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

The nineteenth century was pivotal in shaping contemporary Western attitudes toward fat. Victorian representations of fatness participated in the construction of knowledge about bodies in general, intersecting with economic, medical, gendered, and racial discourses. Fatness was thought to make manifest those hidden consumer appetites lurking within all bodies. It thus provided a visual grounding for the impetus toward bourgeois self-management. At the same time, representations of fatness were complicated by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and race. This essay argues for the adoption of new directions for research that foreground the role played by perceptions of body size in the construction of Victorian bodies. Fattening Victorian studies requires an interrogation of the ways in which the normative ideologies and practices associated with bourgeois body management have structured a society that was, and remains, hostile to fat bodies.

This article makes a case to the effect that the free will vs. determinism dichotomy is relevant for Victorianists.

This essay surveys the variant meanings and uses of the term “girl” caused by gender, age, class, race, and etymological differences. It argues that the extremes of idealization and contempt expressed toward girls and through the figure of the girl accentuate the girl's use as a fulcrum for assigning value in Victorian literature and culture.

Although grammar is often associated with schematic approaches to education, it was a hotly contested subject in the nineteenth century. Considering nineteenth-century grammar texts, as well as the recent turn to “grammar” as a theoretical lens in nineteenth-century studies, this keywords entry proposes that grammar, far from reflecting fixed and incontrovertible precepts, serves as a powerful tool for querying and renegotiating disciplinary structures.

Historicity—that is, a cultural and aesthetic engagement with historical movement—is a crucial term for analyzing and evaluating what we commonly call “realist” fiction. In The Historical Novel (1939), Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel's ability to capture historical movement through typical characters, a feature he tied to Walter Scott's historical romances. For Lukács, Scott's “faithfulness” to history does not imply “a chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction of language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past.” Rather, it comes from the way Scott uses “necessary anachronism” to portray the past “as the necessary prehistory of the present,” primarily through his protagonists’ symbolic movement between warring camps. Although historical romances remained popular in British literature after Scott's death, Victorian historical romances differed from the Waverley novels in important ways. This brief keyword essay considers the nature of those differences and their effect on literature's historicity more generally.

This keyword essay discusses the importance of centering Indigenous perspectives as Victorianists engage in the work of “decolonizing” their research and teaching. It underscores the necessity of citing Native and First Nations scholars and activists and of building reciprocal relations with living Indigenous communities in both local and global contexts.

Informal empire is less a settled concept than a vexing category. Scholars disagree on the complicity of individuals, the extent of government oversight, and even whether informal empire is in fact imperial. I argue that informal empire is best approached through the lens of paradox. It is a system with no centralized authority yet which gave Britain a powerful role in the formation of Latin America. It relied on the continuing independence of Latin American nations and yet compromised their sovereignty. It often fostered the economic progress of the new nations and yet strangled their development. It grew out of the labor of thousands of individual migrants and travelers, and yet many of these people had no sense that they were involved in something called empire. What informal empire means is still very much up for debate. However, what it does for scholars of the nineteenth century is quite clear: it calls us to the study of imperialism in new ways, asking us to expand our gaze beyond the usual sites, to more openly conceptualize power relations, and—using all the particular powers of literary study we possess—to be attuned to the strangeness and paradox of imperialism.

This keyword essay establishes the significance of international law for the study of Victorian globalization. The history of international law has not really been registered yet by scholars in Victorian studies, but we might obtain a number of dividends by remedying that deficit.

Focusing on the introduction of the word “journalism” to the British reader in the early 1800s demonstrates the growing importance of the so-called Fourth Estate and the newspaper press in British media history. The word is borrowed from the French journalisme, which had been introduced into France much earlier.

Raymond Williams influentially claimed that the history of the English novel could be organized through the problem of the “knowable community.” This keyword entry rehearses, clarifies, and extends the idea of the “knowable” in Williams's theory of the novel. I argue that the dialectical (neither entirely subjective nor entirely objective) dimension of the concept has been overlooked, with attendant consequences for the important transition between George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in Williams's account.