Beschreibung:
<jats:p>In their field-shaking 2020 essay, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong set out to “think carefully and deliberately about how we can develop a truly relational thinking and set of practices that engage scholarship across fields and disciplines, enabling a cross-fertilization of ideas, a coalition-based politics and activism, and even a refashioning of academic structures to better serve the purposes of equity and justice.” Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie make a similarly powerful call in their introductory essay, “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” for a 2021 special issue of <jats:italic>Victorian Literature and Culture</jats:italic>. This “widening” occurs across different fields and dimensions, stemming from a “wish to examine the interpretive and methodological possibilities that emerge when we expand our objects of study beyond what has been ordained by the temporal—and spatial—purview of the British nineteenth century, which is to say that we wish to put further pressure on the geotemporal linkage that has largely tethered studies of the nineteenth century to the geographic confines of Britain.” My sense is that central to these projects to “undiscipline” and “widen” the Victorian field should be a reexamining of our reading practices as scholars. What do we read, and when? Do we stick to our “subfields,” however we define these, or do we venture elsewhere? And what does it look like to read “elsewhere” while continuing to produce meaningful scholarship?</jats:p>