Contesting Cosmopolitan Moments in the Long Eighteenth Century traces expansions of Classical cosmopolitanism in long-eighteenth-century Britain to shows how acts of inclusion from cosmopolitan viewpoints sought to cope with British imperialism, war, social injustice, slavery, and technologies of self- and societal improvement, concerns that survive to this day. The Classical inheritance uncovered here yields more precise contouring of cosmopolitanism and of the eighteenth-century innovations that prefigure postcolonial debates. Additionally, considerations of style fill a lacuna in eighteenth-century literary studies, where cosmopolitanism remains a rather under-explored hermeneutical tool. Inviting readers to appreciate cosmopolitanism as a developing rather than as a static and completed philosophy, this study refutes an objection that circulated in the eighteenth century and is still present today, namely, cosmopolitanism’s disdain for local values.
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Cet ouvrage retrace les développements du cosmopolitisme classique dans la Grande-Bretagne du XVIIIe siècle afin de montrer comment les actes d’inclusion issus d’une perspective cosmopolite ont cherché à faire face à l’impérialisme britannique, à la guerre, à l’injustice sociale, à l’esclavage et aux technologies d’amélioration personnelle et sociale, des préoccupations qui perdurent encore aujourd’hui.
L’héritage classique mis en lumière ici par Enit Karafili Steiner permet de mieux cerner le cosmopolitisme et les innovations du XVIIIe siècle qui préfigurent les débats post-coloniaux. Invitant les lecteurs à apprécier le cosmopolitisme comme une philosophie en développement plutôt que comme une philosophie statique et achevée, cette étude réfute une objection qui circulait au XVIIIe siècle et qui est toujours d’actualité, à savoir le mépris du cosmopolitisme pour les valeurs locales.
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Enit Karafili Steiner is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is the editor of Cosmopolitan Endeavours (2020), and author of Northanger Abbey/Persuasion: Readers’ Guide to Essential Criticism (2016) and Jane Austen's Civilized Women: Morality, Gender and the Civilizing Process (2012). She has also edited Called to Civil Existence: Dialogues on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (2014) and Frances Brooke's The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (2013).
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What Does Cosmopolitanism Want?
1. Like Rivers Increased and Refined: Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizens of the World
2. Wollstonecraft’s Cosmopolitanism and Planetary Suffering
3. Raising the Child-Friend of Abolitionism
4. Cosmopolitan Calling and Censure in The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1810)
5. Air of the World and the 'Murky Night of the Empire' in The Last Man
Afterword: Expansive yet Particularised Moments
Bibliography
Index