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RELUCTANT COSMOPOLITANISM IN DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2010

John McBratney
John McBratney*
Affiliation:
John Carroll University
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Extract

It has recently been suggested, in various quarters, that cosmopolitanism, a concept that has proved broadly useful and popular in Victorian studies in the last several years, may have entered its critical senescence. The reports of its decline are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. I would like to prove the continuing vigor of the concept by using it in a reading of Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61). Conceiving of the cosmopolitan figure as a mediator between native English and colonial subjectivities, I will argue that Pip and Magwitch are reluctant cosmopolitans of indeterminate national identity. Although their final lack of a home country represents a psychological loss, the sympathy they learn to feel for each other – a fellow-feeling between gentleman and convict produced by a transnational irony enacted across class and cultural divides – represents a clear ethical gain, the attainment of a partial universalism that goes to the heart of the moral vision of the novel. Throughout this study, I will seek to extend that “rigorous genealogy of cosmopolitanism” that Amanda Anderson has urged (“Cosmopolitanism” 266).

Type
Articles
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 529 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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