Victorian Periodicals Review

What did it mean to be cosmopolitan at the fin de siècle, and how did different writers position themselves in relation to developing understandings of world literature, citizenship, and world languages? In this meticulously researched study, Stefano Evangelista explores the complex ways in which writers of fiction and poetry, social commentators, journalists, illustrators, translators, and philosophers pondered the meanings and socio-political impact of cosmopolitanism in a rapidly changing global economy and shaped new beliefs about the possibilities of global communication. At the fin de siècle, these polemical debates showcased the contradictions and controversies surrounding transnational exchanges and translation in a transitional age.

Invoking cosmopolitanism’s Greek derivation of “world citizenship,” this study begins by tracing the development of the term throughout the nineteenth century via Immanuel Kant and Charles Baudelaire, with a particular emphasis on the thinking of key fin de siècle figures such as Walter Pater, Walter Crane, and Henry James. Evangelista configures cosmopolitanism as a “dynamic phenomenon,” fundamentally committed to tolerance and liberal humanism; in dialogue with aestheticism, decadence, and utopianism; and (mostly) antithetical to dangerous forms of nationalism (256). While he draws on recent theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism, ethics, and the nation by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Pheng Cheah, and others, his tendency to focus on nineteenth-century debates is sometimes a bit limiting. Yet Evangelista is not afraid to expose the darker, more problematic side of intercultural connections; he examines how “cosmopolitan ideology intersected with free-trade capitalism and imperialism, or overlapped with forms of materialism and social privilege associated with ideas of worldliness” (256). One of his central arguments is that to be a citizen of the world—a contemporary phrase signalling a sense of “at homeness” when crossing borders or communicating transnationally—is effectively to be a citizen of nowhere (17). Yet Evangelista does not see this nowhere as “the dark heart of world citizenship,” a place of emptiness and fear, but “rather as a fecund space of insight, resistance, and cultural critique” (257).

Building on discussions about cosmopolitan aestheticism, imagined communities, and comparative literature, the book sets out to push beyond the traditional focus on European (or Euro-American) writers in discussions of world literature. Evangelista considers well-known authors, illuminating, for example, Oscar Wilde’s debt to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his [End Page 300] provocative “bad French” in the 1892 play Salomé (57). But he also examines the lesser known, such as the Irish-born writer Lafcadio Hearn, who moved to Japan in 1890 and became a key publiciser of its culture, myths, and legends. In travel essays such as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Hearn included folk tales and reflections on the Japanese supernatural. He also translated French and Russian fiction for American readers of the Times-Democrat in the 1880s, including the work of Théophile Gautier. His work is deliberately defamiliarizing, Evangelista argues, as against the advice of his friends, he often made his characters speak “transliterated Japanese and reproduced transliterations of Japanese proverbs, poems, and songs, usually providing translations and further philological explanations in the footnotes” (105). This admiration for strangeness becomes part of a protest against “Western cultural assimilation of Japan by emphasising elements of foreignness, dissonance and difficulty” (105). However, Hearn can be viewed equally as an “anti-cosmopolitan cosmopolitan” for conflating patriotic and nationalist sentiments bordering on xenophobia elsewhere in his writing (110).

One of the key strengths of the book is its emphasis on the practices and critical reception of translation, regarded at the fin de siècle as “a highly complex and specialized literary craft” (86). Translation, envisaged as a creative act on a par with authorship, “deliberately activated new meanings from moving literary content across languages and geographical space” (87). Evangelista argues that translators relied on French books and periodicals “as a way into foreign literature”; French was often used “as a filter or transitional zone between world literature and English-speaking readers...