The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

The proposed research will lead to a book entitled The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English 'Fin de Siècle', as well as to two workshops and an international conference designed to explore cosmopolitanism within and beyond the specific historical context of the 1890s.Throughout, I aim to show that knowing how cosmopolitanism was understood in the 1890s can enhance our understanding of, and participation in, the debates around national identity and globalisation that are current in our own day.

Cosmopolitanism, derived from the ancient Greek for 'world citizenship', offers a radical alternative to the ideology of nationalism, asking individuals to imagine themselves as part of a global community that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries. The 1890s witnessed a widespread public debate on cosmopolitanism: in Britain and throughout Europe, this period saw a clash between ideologies of trans-national cooperation and universalism, partly promoted by modern transport and communication technologies, and the rising nationalism that would culminate in the First World War.

My research will show that the 1890s controversy around cosmopolitanism, largely uncharted so far, is a shaping influence on the literary culture of this decade which has long been recognised as a crucial turning point in literary history. Promoters of literary cosmopolitanism questioned the supposedly fundamental link between literature, national identity, and national language: they deliberately sought out the strange and foreign in their works in order to create new ways of reading and writing that crossed boundaries between languages and literary genres as much as between different nations. These practices were denounced as politically and morally suspect by the detractors of cosmopolitanism, who stressed the responsibilities of literature towards local communities and the nation. I aim to show that a nuanced and historically-accurate understanding of the debate on cosmopolitanism transforms our understanding of the literary culture of the fin de siècle, allowing us to move beyond the categories of decadence, impressionism, and symbolism that have dominated the critical tradition. In order to do so, I concentrate on authors who embrace the cosmopolitan ideal but are also careful to define what is at stake in the controversy surrounding it. My monograph will therefore be divided into five chapters that examine, respectively: Oscar Wilde; George Egerton (Mary Dunne Bright); Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé); John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis; and Henry James. Drawing mainly on articles in the periodical press, the introduction will aim to reconstruct the meaning and associations of the term 'cosmopolitanism' for readers in the 1890s, teasing out its literary implications; while the conclusion will relate the 1890s debate on cosmopolitanism to our current discussion about global/local identities.

My case studies have been chosen in order to break down existing distinctions between canonical and marginal writers, 'high' and popular literature, male and female authorship. I will show that the debate on cosmopolitanism involved authors and readerships with very different aesthetic and political agendas. Each chapter draws both on published and archival material in order to piece together literary networks that connect English works from this period with a range of French, Scandinavian, Italian, and German sources. A particularly original aspect of my approach is the emphasis on gender: I argue that politically and socially marginalised groups such as women and homosexual men were drawn to the cosmopolitan ideal as a utopian path towards artistic and personal freedom; and conversely, that cosmopolitanism, with its attack on traditional models of national identity, generated new ways of understanding the body, gender, and sexual identities.

My research on cosmopolitanism addresses fundamental questions about identity that are of vital importance beyond the academic research community: it investigates how the individual relates to the concepts of nationality, citizenship, and community. The cosmopolitan ideal asks women and men to think of themselves as belonging to a broad trans-national order of equals with shared values, rights, and obligations. In the post-war period, this ideal has found a political and institutional embodiment in the United Nations and, more recently, the European Union. Both these institutions, which represent the triumph of the cosmopolitan ideal as bringer of peace and democracy, are experiencing a crisis, as they are challenged in their ability to respond to the needs and aspirations of individuals across the globe.

Policy-makers at national and trans-national level can benefit from my research in order to enhance their understanding of what is at stake for the individual in embracing the cosmopolitan ideal. My research into the 1890s shows that the literary, political, civic, legal, and institutional aspects of cosmopolitanism are inextricably bound within one another. In our age of ever-increasing trans-national traffic, individuals are called upon to reconfigure their allegiances: as the world 'gets smaller' and human interconnection across national, ethnic, and religious divides gets bigger, individuals and communities are forced to renegotiate the conflicting claims of the local and global dimensions of their identity. My research shows that authors in the 1890s already felt that their own modernity forced a 'global' identity on them (although of course they did not have access to this word), and reveals a long history of globalisation that is often ignored in the public discussion. In other words, it aims to demonstrate that a deep and historically-nuanced understanding of the controversy over cosmopolitanism in the 1890s generates new ways of understanding the moral and political debates that characterise the phenomena of globalisation and multiculturalism today.

I therefore hope that my research will also have an impact on how the media discuss issues of local/global identity in a multicultural society, within and beyond the UK. In the UK, the debate over what constitutes a modern British identity, and what values and obligations should be attached to that, has been particularly intense in the last few decades, largely as a result of mass immigration. In particular, my fellowship would fall within a period that is likely to witness an increasing amount of debate on the question of British identity within Europe. The Prime Minister has recently promised to hold an in/out referendum in 2017 if he wins the next general election, in order to give electors the opportunity to determine the place of Britain within the EU. The public discussion about this topic already proliferates in the media, on the internet, and in social networks. In political terms, hostility to the cosmopolitan project represented by European integration reveals the fear that transnational and supranational organisations fail to connect with the individual. On the cultural plane, it translates into an anxiety about loss of identity and the erasure of cultural difference. My research into 1890s cosmopolitanism aims to generate knowledge about identity that is highly transferrable to the present, and that will benefit people involved in making practical decisions as well as helping the larger public understand, for instance, what is at stake in embracing a British and/or European identity and how far each of these can be said to enhance, compensate, or exclude the other.