Description
Book SynopsisStudying 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 Gr
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" . . . GoGwilt manages an impressive synthesis of material." -- Utopian Studies
Table of Contents
Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. A Genealogy of Geopolitics: 1. The geopolitical image: anarchism, imperialism and the hypothesis of culture in the formation of geopolitics; Part II. Culture and Nihilism: Prefiguring Geopolitics: 2. The Victorian blot: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, and the concept of culture; 3. Victorian nihilism: Friedrich Nietzsche and Olive Schreiner; Part III. Utopia and Sabotage: Contesting Geopolitics: 4. Broadcasting news from nowhere: Utopian narrative and the sketch-artistry of R. B. Cunninghame Graham; 5. The geopolitics of screenplay: sabotage from Joseph Conrad to Alfred Hitchcock.
