Middlemarch in Melbourne

Abstract

Although it is noted in bibliographies and databases, the serialization of Middlemarch in the Australasian newspaper of Melbourne in 1872–73 has received little critical attention. This article makes a preliminary effort to redress this knowledge gap using a global media history approach anchored by a southern-hemispherical perspective, permitting this canonical British novel to be recontextualized within the flows of transnational circulation. So doing decenters Eurocentric forms of thinking about imperial literary culture and realist aesthetics. Unexpectedly, as a fragmented colonial newspaper serial, Middlemarch—a provincial novel at the center of modern scholarship about European realism and totality—generates a new cultural field in which to theorize global reception history, transimperial culture, and the dialectic between realism and its remediation in, and between, print forms.