The nineteenth century saw the birth of many modern forms of knowledge production, increasingly sorted across the widening gulf between the human or social and the physical sciences (e.g. comparative philology, anthropology, sociology, statistics, psychology — comparative biology, meteorology, geology, ecology, genetics). It also gave rise to the modern shapes of empire under global capitalism, and to early models of anticolonial struggle; to industrial production at scale, and to proletarian solidarity; to extractive capitalism’s fossil dependency, and to nascent flashes of environmental consciousness.

This seminar, however, is not about the nineteenth century, but rather about the world it made. We aim to convene a group of scholars  who will think collectively, experimentally, and globally about some of the residues, aftereffects, and transformations of cultural phenomena that followed the nineteenth century, as these are registered in later representational forms and imaginative literatures. What are the leftovers, holdovers, hangovers of nineteenth-century thought and praxis? What translations, transformations, and adaptations did these systems undergo in the process of imperial and colonial spread?  Once we isolate these aftermaths, how do they change our view of comparative literary history?

 A major aim of the group will necessarily be to reflect on and to reconsider conventional formations of nineteenth-century literary study, particularly as Eurocentric chronologies and analytics have come under scrutiny — whether as fields (e.g. romanticism, Victorian studies, global Anglophone, decadence) or as formal categories (e.g. historical realism, slave narrative, dramatic monologue, case study, genre fiction). In challenging the nineteenth century as a simple span of time, we are at the same time interested in deforming its accepted array of disciplinary and aesthetic assumptions.