Toward a Multilingual Victorian Transatlanticism

Abstract

This essay argues that scholarship being done under the sign of transatlantic studies, and Victorian transatlantic studies in particular, is problematically focused on the anglophone northern Atlantic region. Challenging both the essentialness and the disciplinary primacy of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, I argue instead that the entire nineteenth-century Atlantic world was a geographically and linguistically permeable space. Paying attention to crossings from north to south and vice versa is both methodologically and ethically necessary. From a methodological perspective, it can help us produce much more thorough answers to the questions transatlantic studies purports to ask about identity and community. But reading beyond anglophone British and U.S. American texts can also help us decolonize our reading and thinking. Of course, work like this requires scholars to read in second and third languages; as such, this essay discusses and denaturalizes the institutional barriers to multilingual English studies. It also offers a case study—a brief reading of a novel by Argentine writer Vicente Fidel López—demonstrating the insights that can be gained by expanding both our geographic perspective and our methodological toolbox.