At home in the city: Cosmopolitanism, urban spectacle and Utopia in British literature, 1850--1925

This dissertation examines the form and ideology of Victorian cosmopolitanism, and its emergence from imperial and utopian conceptions of world unity. Focusing on the ways that “cosmo-polis” generates the idea of the city-as-world, I analyze representations of London that use the city's heterogeneous population and uneven geography as a context for addressing problems of diversity on the national and global scale. Through readings of urban spectacle in literature, sociological writing, and art, I argue that these representations often transcend the privileging of metropole over periphery endemic to imperial ideologies and imagine egalitarian ways of reconciling unity and diversity. By emphasizing cosmopolitanism's utopian potential alongside its more familiar imperialist agenda, my project illuminates the concept's unresolved moral status in contemporary theoretical debates and calls for a revised view of its conceptual history.; Cosmopolitanism might be defined as the project of imagining global communities in space or time. My introductory chapter examines the ways in which panoramic paintings and Wordsworth's The Prelude produce the experience of an “urban sublime” through their use of the horizon, which serves to give the city form while also situating it within a global context. Chapter Two examines texts that engage more explicitly with internationalism and the discourse of urban reform. William Morris and Salvation Army General William Booth both imagine worlds without national borders in which disparities between city and country have been eroded by the establishment of work communes. Chapter Three, on Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and James' The Princess Casamassima, demonstrates the continuity between late nineteenth-century aestheticism and cosmopolitanism by showing how both novels engage these discourses to bring the unassimilable vastness of the city into view as spectacle. In my concluding chapter, I argue that spatial imaginings of the city as a unified whole give way to moments of time as a medium for human connection in novels by Conrad and Woolf Challenging recent understandings of Victorian literature that have associated realist writing with the political space of the nation, my work demonstrates that cosmopolitanism was also a central implication of realism's formal reach and ideological investments.