The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language and literature, most recently captured for Britain in a June 2023 British Academy report, the relevant findings of which are the decline in the information age and under neoliberal governments of university students reading English Literature and the rise of Creative Writing and world literatures in translation. I distinguish global from world Englishes as the hegemonic language of global trade and finance from more bottom-up Englishes mixed with other languages on the streets; discuss the state of English studies globally; and propose decolonising and denationalising the curriculum. The notion of national languages, identifying a language with national unity, is a very modern idea, only about three centuries old and arising with the formation of modern nation-states. We might use the lived histories of global and world Englishes to transcend both romantic revolutionary and far-right exclusionary nationalisms in literary and language studies in favour of more cosmopolitan, multilingual, and convivial approaches.

My 2018 book, Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century, begins, “To study literatures in which global processes criss-cross distinct environments requires (1) translators and transculturalists who know diverse literary histories and history of genres, and (2) the disciplines relating to environments of nature (natu-ral sciences), culture (the humanities), and technology (social sciences, engineering, and medicine)”. 1 Literature can give us precise, authentic accounts of life as felt or experienced in each specific niche of nature, culture, and technology at a particular moment. The study of global literatures therefore requires collaborators who know their own respec-tive literary histories, genres, and styles within their specific environments. Since 2004 I have been cultivating such collaborations. 2 This seems to point to a method adequate to a period of such extreme technological and geopolitical change as that covered by Cusp ’s remit c.1880–1920. Distinct cultures have their own temporalities, yet this period was transformative across many cultures. Before we return to methodology, it may be worth recapping a few of the features of the world at that time. Technical innovations gave rise to what is com-monly called the second industrial revolution. Britain and the US saw the rise of Taylorism, Fordism, the first monopolies and corporate con-solidation, trade unionism and strikes, the rise of consumer and women shopping rather than farming/gardening/cooking, eugenics, and social Darwinism (as as Britain). Metal detection, machine gun, AC motor, aeroplane, tractor,

Will students raised on social media still read English literature?What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India, Australasia, the USA?What is the role of English language in relation to other global and local languages?What is the role of decolonising efforts?How do our respective state apparatuses affect language and literature teaching?Part I 'International Perspectives on English Language and Literature' summarises the global spread of English since the eighteenth century and outlines the concerns of the special issue: the global futures of English language and literature in information society in Africa, Australia, India, the PRC, Europe and the UK, and the USA; the role of decolonising efforts; and the role of our respective state apparatuses in higher education policy. Part II, 'English Studies in Britain Today', discusses the findings of the recent (June 2023) British Academy report English Studies Provision in UK Higher Education, including the decline in literary studies among students and the rise of Creative Writing in part in response to political-economic rhetoric. Part III, 'Global and World Englishes', returns to global and transnational practices beyond Britain and Europe to argue for more inclusive, decolonising practices around world literatures. We might take the lived histories of global and world Englishes to transcend both romantic revolutionary and far-right exclusionary nationalisms in literary and language studies in favour of more cosmopolitan, multilingual, and convivial approaches.

Building on eighteenth-century philosophical traditions, Victorian aesthetics were often posed as an antidote to the vicissitudes of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic demands of the marketplace, and in most cultures undergoing modernization the Beautiful has often functioned in opposition to the forces of power and instrumentality and their corrosive effects on social life. Readers of 19 will be familiar with the Victorian environment — the workhouses, the poverty, the invention and technology, the urbanization, the Empire. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Islamic world saw the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the effects of European colonization, and modernizing forces in China led to the greatest rejection of a 3000-year-old tradition in world history. This Forum contribution compares Western, Islamic, and Chinese aesthetics. My argument is that since the nineteenth century, modern aesthetics have typically functioned dialectically against the constraints of scarcity, exploitation, and tyranny, and that within them Nature and the natural world play a particularly valuable role, one that is threatened today in the market failure of global warming and unsustainability.

The conditions of rapid change and modernization that swept the world from the second half of the nineteenth century enforced the new nationalisms, imperialisms, racisms, anti-Semitisms, and, more positively, sexualities that are again sweeping the world today. The longue durée of modern globalization that began with British industrialization continues with our contemporary forms of technological expansion, international competition, populist disaffection, and accompanying forms of stress, anxiety, depression, nostalgia, regression: decadence. This essay will focus on the political-economic conditions of the period and the cosmopolitanism and progressivism that resisted, and continue to resist, them. I conclude with the classic Japanese analysis of the condition, Kobayashi Hideo's “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933).

ABSTRACT The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. World-historically, this was the emergence of self-governing dominions of Anglophone cultures, increasing US influence, and decolonization. Eighty-five states gained independence since 1922, with the African nation-states after 1956. While nationalist projects often deferred the Woman Question, liberal projects of New Womanism initiated debate between feminist individualism and more collectivist practices and ideologies. Movements like social Darwinism and eugenics impacted on women, and in terms of deformed relations of part to whole (a classic definition of decadence), modernization included the great unification movements of the “Pans” – Pan-Hellenism, -Islamism, -Asianism, -Africanism, and Zionism – but also the partitions of India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, the PRC/Taiwan, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, and Cyprus, which often impacted women unequally. Under processes of globalization and nation-building, modernization and expressions of decadence have been in dialectical relations, though the meanings and targets shift as hegemons rise and fall.

Abstract:Part I of this article was originally written as a Foreword to William B. Dillingham's edition of the children's fiction writer Juliana Horatia Ewing, Artistic Duplicity: The Fiction and Poetry of Juliana Horatia Ewing. (2020). Part II uses this occasion, the final volume of ELT, to reflect on the internal complexities of the Transition Period: humanitarianism and empire; Aesthetes, Naturalists, realists; micro and macro; Christian chivalry and race domination; moralism and immorality. [72 words]

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This chapter synthesizes research on the global circulation of Dickens and the place of Dickens in current debates about World Literatures and Translation Studies. It focuses on Dickens outside Britain, Europe, and North America, in terms of geography as well as literary traditions: New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Socialist Poland, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, with some reference to more widely studied areas such as Spanish, Russian, and South Asian literary traditions. It urges us to think less in terms of originality and derivation than of circulation, appropriation, use, and their corollaries of triangulation, transculturation, revoicing, and (re)mediation. It considers the multiple meanings of ‘Dickens’ in cultural translation and in global literary histories. Societies caught between traditional cultures and the forces of modernization give rise to ‘Dickensian’ novels, ‘Dickensian’ characters, ‘Dickensian’ affect, ‘Dickensian’ institutions, and so forth, showing that comparable conditions give rise to formal resemblances.

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