This short keyword essay begins by turning to the socially progressive “New Liberalism” of the decades around 1900 in order to think about the eclipse of certain traditions of liberal thought from the Cold War onward (this part of the essay takes its cue from Sam Moyn's recent Carlyle lectures on Cold War liberalism). The piece then considers how the (literary, political, social) legacies of this reconstituted liberalism might speak to our own current (“neoliberal” rather than “New Liberal”) moment when, in Bonnie Honig's words, “efficiency is no longer one value among others. . . . It has become rationality itself, and it is the standard by which everything is assessed.”

This entry posits the life-size as a form of “technology” for collapsing time and space and closes by suggesting some ways in which literary authors were inspired by the proliferation of life-size forms in culture.

Talk of meaning and meaningfulness, ubiquitous today, only emerges in the nineteenth century. This emergence remains to be explained and calls into question accounts of modernity that treat “meaning” as a stable, timeless concept.

Despite neo-Victorianism's theoretical awareness of how colonial structures continue to infuse imaginations of the long nineteenth century, and how neo-Victorian culture might challenge both Victorian and contemporary ideological structures, common practices of neo-Victorian scholarship too often remain constricted in their geographical and conceptual breadth. In thinking about the structural convergences and challenges between Victorian studies and neo-Victorian studies, this keyword entry emphasizes texts and cultural traditions that have rarely been the purview of the neo-Victorian. Informed by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's analysis of race as a central function in Victorian studies, it charts alternative neo-Victorian genealogies in anglophone African and Black British literatures and cultures. On this basis, it asks how conceptions of the neo-Victorian will need to change if the field is to take seriously its anticolonial potential.

The ideal of the British New Woman, variously representing feminist, activist, fashion reformer, and writer, has been the subject of renewed critical interest since the late twentieth century. Although symptomatic of its situation in the fin de siècle, which “names those things that were never quite assimilated into the high-Victorian moment,” since the 1980s the New Woman has transcended its polemical Victorian conceptualization to represent “prequels to modernism as well as sequels to Victorianism.” As Sally Ledger has argued, the New Woman, despite being largely a “discursive phenomenon,” was nonetheless historically significant and central to late Victorian literary culture.

This entry expands upon the “oceans” entry from the original Keywords issue. In moving from “oceans” to the “oceanic,” I call for a hydrographic remapping of the nineteenth century, offering a new perspective of networked culture, geopolitics, and ecology via maritime circulation and exchange. Noting selected recent projects as examples in this critical turn, I emphasize the stakes, affordances, and challenges of “reading the oceanic.” The oceanic, I contend, is not simply a descriptor of space but rather an active, ideologically charged and theoretically robust mode of representation.

In the nineteenth century, Britain had intense political, economic, and cultural relations with the Ottoman Empire: they were political allies during the Crimean War; for several decades, British creditors ran the Ottoman economy via Ottoman Public Debt Administration; many Ottoman cultural institutions, such as the Imperial Museum, were modeled after their British counterparts. Given this interconnected history, this essay argues that the Ottoman Empire could provide a rich field of inquiry for the Victorian studies as the field tries to “undiscipline” itself.

Paper represents a potent but underexplored keyword for Victorian studies today. Not only is it the unacknowledged techno-material a priori of Victorian studies itself, but its histories also offer material connections that link literary texts, bureaucracy, and consumer culture to global ecologies and resource extraction.

Nineteenth-century piracy expressed a winking attitude toward many widespread forms of unauthorized reuse and thus conditioned the emergence of vast, innovative, and dynamic pan-media and transnational networks of aesthetic communications.

This essay argues that “planet” has recently become an important concept for scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whereas concepts such as the “globe” or the “world” portray the Earth as a space subject to surveillance and political power, the concept of the planet emphasizes the alien, nonanthropocentric aspects of the Earth and its history.

This essay sketches out how “the provinces” became a central (if semi-imagined) geography in nineteenth-century culture, usually opposed to—though ultimately inextricable from—the development of capitalist and colonial modernity. Surveying recent criticism on the Victorian provincial novel, especially its imbrication with broader scales and networks, I suggest that recent scholarship in critical cartography and feminist theory offers a way to reconceptualize the notion of the provincial in (and beyond) Victorian studies. If to be provincial is always to be opposed to some real or imagined center—toggling between countryside, colony, region, and minor capital—we might revise our understanding of the provincial itself as a relational phenomenon, unfolding on multiple scales. Ultimately, I propose the “provincial” as a critical heuristic for the spatial analysis of narrative: one that might offer a more productive means of grasping modernity's uneven production of space beyond city/country, metropole/colony, and even local/global divides.

The Victorian period was notorious for its oblique representations of sexual violence. This article argues that rape is a necessary word and concept for Victorian studies and, we contend, a keyword for a growing subfield of literary and cultural scholarship, humanistic rape studies. Without rape as a stable signifier of specific acts, we find ourselves transported back to the nineteenth century, fumbling like Tess Durbeyfield for language that adequately describes what happened. Rape remains an indispensable domain of nineteenth-century literary studies precisely because it is a thoroughly historically contingent phenomenon. It is part of the power of rape, of its current structural pervasiveness, that it is capable of shaping people's expectations to such an extent that it suggests itself as a timeless, eternally recurring fact of life, when it actually amounts to an intensely situated set of behaviors, many of which crystallized into their current forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propelled by changing labor conditions, European imperialism, and shifting family and romantic configurations. Literary scholarship, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, has traditionally attempted to tether representations of gender-based violence to “objective,” transhistorical frameworks such as “the law” and psychology, a move we wish to counter here.

This keywords entry proposes that critical infrastructure studies allows us to better understand the cultural lives of nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires and asks: How would conceptualizing theatrical repertoire as an imaginative infrastructure help us understand its cultural legacies in our own day? Nineteenth-century theatrical repertoires functioned in analogous ways to material-technical infrastructure: on one hand, providing routine and taken-for-granted conditions of performance; on the other, encoding asymmetric patterns of belonging and inclusion, proximity and distance, that we see reinforced by infrastructure. Repertoire is thus recast as a means of actively communicating and managing meaning on an enormous scale.

This essay argues that secular is an important keyword for Victorian studies because it foregrounds the particularity of universal concepts. Victorian narratives of secularization and colonial regimes of religious toleration can all be shown to have roots in the Protestant conception of religion as private individual belief and voluntary association. They therefore raise the question of how and whether such political conceptions might transcend their particularist origins. To make this point I begin by exploring the difference between secularism and secularization as critical terms. I then suggest how the recent wave of work on secularism has illuminated the link between the two—namely, by showing how attempts to imagine a secular world in fact depend upon specific ideas of what religion is and where it belongs.

Anglo-American socialism has reached a curious impasse. Levels of economic inequality not seen since the nineteenth century would lead one to anticipate an upsurge in socialist affiliation and activism. Nevertheless, socialism has stagnated as a political force. This essay argues that, as a collectivist ideology, socialism demands a degree of communal identification that modern individuals find uncomfortable, even threatening, to the integrity of the self. Investigating this discomfort leads me to argue that, while socialism is not a religion (pace the claim of Gareth Stedman Jones), it nonetheless flourishes in eras of spiritual and societal foment. In such periods, communal effervescence softens the boundaries of the self, rendering collectivist ideologies like socialism more intuitive and appealing. Given desacralizing trends in Anglo-America, a contemporary socialist revival would seem unlikely. Consequently, I argue that it is time for progressives to embrace, rather than critique, the strong sense of individual autonomy and deep subjectivity that characterizes bourgeois individualism. The Victorian socialist canon provides many resources for a reconciliation of individualism and collectivism, which I illustrate via reference to H. G. Wells, John Stuart Mill, and Oscar Wilde.

This essay focuses on the proliferation of diverse spiritualities in Victorian Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Theosophy, neopaganism, spiritualism, and emerging occult practices. It makes the case that this proliferation of spiritual thought emerged not in opposition to, but rather in harmony with, the ascendancy of scientific naturalist frameworks in the wake of Darwinism, and that the flexibility of “spirituality” as a concept serves a crucial function for understanding this late Victorian religious landscape. As a (very brief) case study, it examines the fusion of the spiritual and scientific in Marie Corelli's late Victorian bestseller, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Her work, I suggest, highlights the key role of new popular genres of speculative fiction in navigating the boundaries between spirit and matter at the fin de siècle.

Sugar is in the bloodstream of our modern world. We crave it as a treat and fear it as an increasingly urgent health risk. Although sugar had been used for centuries in small quantities as a spice, a medicine, and a foodstuff, it was only in the nineteenth century that it became the omnipresent, mass-produced, habit-forming, and health-impacting commodity we recognize today. This article charts the staggering increase in sugar production in the Victorian period—from 572,000 tons in 1830 to 6.1 million tons by 1890—to suggest that sugar, and acts of consuming it, acquired figurative and culturally contingent meanings that Victorian writers could use to represent and respond to some of the most pressing cultural questions of their day. For scholars of the nineteenth century, sugar affords us a lens for viewing Victorian cultural change and for interrogating the stories that Britain continues to tell itself today about the physical, economic, and moral health of the nation.

Most readers of this journal will not have seen this word before. How, then, can it claim a spot in this Keyword issue of Victorian Literature and Culture? How can a non-English word—not even a loan word in English—become an English keyword? Ta‘āruf’s presence here can be justified through the now less-familiar definition of the term “keyword” itself: “a word that serves as the key to a cipher or code.” A loan word from Arabic, in Persian ta‘āruf means pleasantries, greetings, and hospitality, on one hand, and gift-giving on the other. Conjoining a sense of linguistic surplus and gift-exchange, ta‘āruf, I argue, serves as a key to decipher some complications at the intersection of economic and linguistic exchange in Victorian literature and culture. As such, it also establishes that “Victorian” culture emerges out of transnational bargains of exchange and translation.

In this article I argue for the relevance of examining tolerance in Victorian literature in its specificity and particularly as distinct from sympathy. Following a recent reconceptualization of tolerance in philosophy and political theory, I argue for recovering the relevance of its roots in the Latin term tolerare, which means “to suffer,” “to endure,” and suggest that Victorian novels explore the cognitive, emotional, and physical pains involved in tolerance. Victorian studies thus add an important perspective to current discussions of tolerance, while, conversely, a focus on tolerance in Victorian literature reveals an important category as yet overshadowed by the strong focus on sympathy in the field.

“Trans” offers Victorian studies two different but ultimately intertwined methods for studying sex and gender in a historically bounded discipline: nominal, biographical work and theoretical, conceptual work. While biographical accounts tend to evoke historicist concerns of anachronism, the theoretical potential of “trans” is largely untouched in Victorian studies. This Keywords essay argues that such theoretical work is much needed in analyses of Victorian sex and gender, and makes the case for “trans” as historical method.