The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock
Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture.

The book’s second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the affinities between Olive Schreiner and Friedrich Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the nihilist positivism and eurocentrism of the culture hypothesis.

The third part examines the relation between the utopian globalism of international socialism and the geopolitical dystopia of world war. One chapter delineates the geography of politics in the 1890s through the medium of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s political journalism and early modernist sketch-artistry. The final chapter traces the meaning of “sabotage” from its anarcho-syndicalist origins to its geopolitical significance in early films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, the book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the nineteenth-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the twentieth-century fiction of geopolitics.

"1111103750"
The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock
Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture.

The book’s second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the affinities between Olive Schreiner and Friedrich Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the nihilist positivism and eurocentrism of the culture hypothesis.

The third part examines the relation between the utopian globalism of international socialism and the geopolitical dystopia of world war. One chapter delineates the geography of politics in the 1890s through the medium of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s political journalism and early modernist sketch-artistry. The final chapter traces the meaning of “sabotage” from its anarcho-syndicalist origins to its geopolitical significance in early films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, the book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the nineteenth-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the twentieth-century fiction of geopolitics.

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The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock

The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock

by Christopher GoGwilt
The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock

The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock

by Christopher GoGwilt

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Overview

Studying a range of writers, genres, and disciplines, this book interrogates the status of geopolitics as a powerful twentieth-century fiction. The first part argues, through a reading of anarchist and imperialist geographers, that geopolitics emerged as a pseudoscience from the breakdown of nineteenth-century ideas of culture.

The book’s second part addresses the fate of the European hypothesis of culture, beginning with a chapter that studies the novels of Wilkie Collins within the historical context of democratic reform and the formalization of Empire. The next chapter finds, in the affinities between Olive Schreiner and Friedrich Nietzsche, a shared diagnosis of the nihilist positivism and eurocentrism of the culture hypothesis.

The third part examines the relation between the utopian globalism of international socialism and the geopolitical dystopia of world war. One chapter delineates the geography of politics in the 1890s through the medium of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s political journalism and early modernist sketch-artistry. The final chapter traces the meaning of “sabotage” from its anarcho-syndicalist origins to its geopolitical significance in early films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Charting the contours of the long turn of the century, from 1860 to 1940, the book moves back and forth from Victorian to modernist fields of study to show how the nineteenth-century European hypothesis of culture haunts the twentieth-century fiction of geopolitics.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780804737319
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Publication date: 09/01/2000
Edition description: 1
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Christopher GoGwilt is Associate Professor of English and former Director of Literary Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford, 1995).

Table of Contents

Illustrationsix
Acknowledgmentsxi
Introduction1
Part I.A Genealogy of Geopolitics
Chapter 1.The Geopolitical Image: Anarchism, Imperialism, and the Hypothesis of Culture in the Formation of Geopolitics17
H. J. Mackinder, the Hypothesis of Culture, and the Formation of Geopolitics20
Mackinder's Geopolitical Image of Britain28
Ratzel's Anthropogeographical Image of Humankind36
Reclus's Social Geography, the Image of the State, and the Hegemony of Europe43
Imaginary Institutions of Geography51
Part II.Culture and Nihilism: Prefiguring Geopolitics
Chapter 2.The Victorian Blot: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, and the Concept of Culture57
The Plot of The Moonstone: "The blot of the Diamond"60
Framing the Plot: Critical Perspectives on Imperialism67
The Blot of Victorian Subjectivity: "On the unanswerable evidence of the paint-stain"71
Victorian Cultural Capital and the Formalizing of Empire, 1858-187679
Chapter 3.Victorian Nihilism: Friedrich Nietzsche and Olive Schreiner86
Friedrich Nietzsche's "Sisters"90
Olive Schreiner's "Strangers"106
Aesthetic Form, European Nihilism, and Pathologies of Power119
Part III.Utopia and Sabotage: Contesting Geopolitics
Chapter 4.Broadcasting News from Nowhere: Utopian Narrative and the Sketch-Artistry of R. B. Cunninghame Graham127
Afterimages of R. B. Cunninghame Graham129
The News of "Bloody Sunday": Lessons in Working-Class Consciousness135
News from Overseas: The Ipane and Edward Garnett's Overseas Library141
News of Death: "Heather Jock" and Cunninghame Graham's Utopian Sense of Community150
News of War: Cunninghame Graham's "Victory" and the Spanish-American War of 1898156
Chapter 5.The Geopolitics of Screenplay: Sabotage from Joseph Conrad to Alfred Hitchcock160
The Meaning of Sabotage162
Anarcho-Syndicalist Origins167
The Anarchist Premises of The Secret Agent: From Agency to Secret Agency173
Mass Media, Cinematic Narrative, and the Subject of Geopolitics184
Sabotage and the Geopolitics of Screenplay190
Coda198
Notes201
Bibliography233
Index249
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