Provincial

Abstract

This essay sketches out how “the provinces” became a central (if semi-imagined) geography in nineteenth-century culture, usually opposed to—though ultimately inextricable from—the development of capitalist and colonial modernity. Surveying recent criticism on the Victorian provincial novel, especially its imbrication with broader scales and networks, I suggest that recent scholarship in critical cartography and feminist theory offers a way to reconceptualize the notion of the provincial in (and beyond) Victorian studies. If to be provincial is always to be opposed to some real or imagined center—toggling between countryside, colony, region, and minor capital—we might revise our understanding of the provincial itself as a relational phenomenon, unfolding on multiple scales. Ultimately, I propose the “provincial” as a critical heuristic for the spatial analysis of narrative: one that might offer a more productive means of grasping modernity's uneven production of space beyond city/country, metropole/colony, and even local/global divides.