Victorian Cosmopolitanisms: Introduction

Though it has become conventional to refer to the “new cosmopolitanisms” when discussing the resurgence of the term in the 1990s, current debates about cosmopolitanism can be traced back to its usages in the nineteenth century. In both its Victorian and contemporary contexts, cosmopolitanism ranges in connotation from the pejorative to the progressive and in denotation from a phenomenon to an ideal. This constitutive ambivalence helps to explain the controversy that has attended the term, both then and now.