This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century - including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad - explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism - the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world - to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.

Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century - including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad - explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism - the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world - to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.

Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

The Secret Agent is set in the seedy world of Adolf Verloc, a storekeeper and double agent in late-Victorian London who pretends to sympathize with a group of international anarchists but reports on their activities to both the Russian embassy and the British government. As he is drawn further into a terrorist bombing plot, his family also becomes involved, with devastating consequences. Based on a real-life failed anarchist plot, The Secret Agent is both intimately engaged with its historical moment and profoundly relevant today. This new Broadview Edition helps to recreate the historical context that informed Conrad's preoccupations with global terrorism, human degeneration, the relativity of time, and the position of women.