Joseph W. Childers

Industrial culture and the Victorian novel

Among the vast array of goods and materials produced during the aggressive onset of industrialism in Britain in the early Victorian period, none was more widely disseminated, more instrumental to everyday life, more essential to the shaping of industrial culture than information. For along with the grand melange of things that seemed to flow unchecked out of British factories, a river of knowledge (and questions) about how the world worked coursed through every aspect of Victorian life. The eras most conspicuous outward signs of unprecedented material change - steam engines, factories, railroads, urbanization - denoted even grander transformations in the way people thought and acted. Received notions about everything from gender to nationalism, from class to religion, from propriety to biology were open to question. Even assumptions about such fundamentals as space and time were challenged. Not only were people living differently, they were thinking differently, talking and writing differently, acting differently. They were existing differently. Such monumental changes and the effects they wrought became both the form and the substance of nearly all forms of inquiry. On the abstract level, thinkers like Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Pater took up the issue of “progress” - or at the very least “change” - in terms of its political, moral, and aesthetic implications. Others, from novelists such as Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli, Kingsley, and Frances Trollope to the new breed of social investigator like Edwin Chadwick, James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Henry Mayhew, while often fully aware of the abstract principles that grounded their work, were more directly invested in the concrete examples of change (as either progress or decline) that quotidian life provided.

Of Prison Notebooks and the Restoration of an Archive

This essay examines the ways in which Antonio Gramscis work has become more accessible through the translations of the Prison Notebooks undertaken by Joseph Buttigieg. While many scholars have had only limited and, often, intellectually mediated access to Gramscis work, Buttigiegs translations offer the possibility of reading the Notebooks not only in their entirety, but also in context. The critical apparatus surrounding this translation is impeccable and provides insights into Gramscis thought that have hitherto been unavailable to those unable to read the original Italian. Consequently, Buttigiegs translations revivify Gramscis work, opening it to a new generation of scholars, to be sure, but also underscoring its prescience and continued timeliness.

Postcolonialism Meets Economics, edited by Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela. New York: Routledge, 2004

This review of Postcolonialism Meets Economics, edited by Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela, examines the collections attempt to rethink economic thought in light of postcolonial analysis and its concomitant attack on modernist epistemology.

“Stranded at a Distance”: The Symposium on Bombay-London-New York

“Stranded at a Distance” responds to Amitava Kumars Bombay-London-New York by asking readers to consider the elegance and nuances of the prose as well as subtlety with which Kumar interrogates current postcolonial theories of representation, hybridity, and “home.” While Kumars work refuses the facile essentializing that characterizes so much identity theory (either in its final moves or in its attacks), it also retains something of the humanness that typifies Kumars entire project. This piece argues that Kumars book is flexible yet insistent in its demands of a recognition of places, labor, and connections that no longer fit easily into the conventional pigeonholes. It refuses to allow those who are at home in the world in general, but who can call no particular place home, to become “invisible,” only so much background noise, undifferentiated labor, completely at the mercy of a culture that does not because it cannot recognize them.