Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

During a meeting of the People's Front of Judea in Monty Python's The Life of Brian, Reg, their leader, denounces the Roman Empire ("They've taken everything we had") and poses to his followers what he believes to be a rhetorical question: "And what have they ever given us in return?!" To his amazement, some of them start to suggest answers, and gradually we get a long list of things that the Romans had given, which the irritated Reg tries to dismiss: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Regenia Gagnier's scholarly book, which discusses the world-wide dissemination of Victorian words and ideas, is miles away from Monty Python's comical film; nor does it share the film's satire on hollow anti-imperialistic rhetoric. However, the book does seem to acknowledge, perhaps malgré lui, the contribution of the British culture to countries around the globe, and calls attention to the expansion of the English language and literature during the 19^th century: "Between 1780 and 1930 . . . the number of English speakers rocketed from twelve million to 200 million" (3). While criticizing the cultural marginalization of indigenous peoples, which can be no less destructive than the brute force of European "gunpowder" empires, and censuring present-day neoliberal ideology, the author resists dogmatic thinking and emphasizes the complexity of the "dancing" of cultures in contact, pointing out the vital role that British Victorian literature and ideas played in the countries under British dominion. The relationship between such "dance" partners is never that of a simple oppressive imposition by one partner, and, while sometimes the relationship will be exploitative, "at other times it will be voluntary, as in willed processes of modernization" (4), as in the case of the inspiring and liberating role that the works of Sean O'Casey and W. B. Yeats played for Korean writers and intellectuals during the 1930s (4–5).

Gagnier's book offers a genuinely broad comparative perspective on the circulation of Victorian and Anglophone ideologies, social movements, ideas, authors, literary motives and forms, and on the ways in which they migrated to China, Japan, India, Russia, and Turkey, among other countries (3–4), as well as on the ways in which they were adapted to diverse local needs. Because of this wide-ranging perspective, the book calls for a revision in the field of Victorian literature studies, which should no longer be restrictively considered "an island's [End Page 371] literature" but, rather, should encompass "the British empire and Anglophone settlements" (3).

Different chapters in the book present a heterogeneous array of topics, loosely related in addressing the circulation of words, literary works, ideas, cultural and even material commodities during the 19^th century. The following two general questions reverberate throughout all the discussions:

First, how may we, in language and literature studies, best study global processes of modernization, democratization, and liberalization without losing the specificity of the local? Second, how may we best study the uniqueness of distinct locales where the forces of tradition and modernization meet?

(6)

The opening chapter calls attention to heteroglossia in India (a conservative estimate of about 415 languages and dialects), which gives rise to a tension between "preservation and protection or laissez-faire and evolution" (2), and offers an overview of the entire book. Chapter 2 follows the evolvement of certain liberal ideas of the 19^th century and the ways in which they have become distorted into a neoliberal ideology, including a discussion of the translation into Chinese of thinkers like Darwin and Mill (40), and, en passant, a short history of the rickshaw (45). Chapter 3 focuses on the dialogic, polyphonic style described by Bakhtin, central to the liberal literary tradition. In her discussion of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov the author emphasizes that it is

not the content of Dostoevsky's ideas that...