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The V21 Manifesto of 2015 proposes that we revitalize Victorian Studies through the use of presentist historicism, a methodology that recognizes how “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth century.” Presentism—once seen by some as a bug in historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature. While scholars such as Dominick LaCapra and Jennifer Fleissner have also explored presentism in historicist work, the V21 Manifesto brings renewed attention to the questions and problems presentism poses. This review explores two books by members of the V21 Collective. Both interrogate vital issues in the present: Anna Kornbluh focuses on financialization and canonical Victorian and modernist texts, Susan Zieger on ephemera and affect and middlebrow texts. Both differently erudite books reinvigorate our thinking about the past. At the same time, both books avoid questions of production in the past and present. Such avoidance creates nondialectical and specialist accounts of the past’s relation to the present and enshrines and safeguards Victorian literary studies’ privileged objects of study and methodologies. Appreciative of the ways the V21 Manifesto has renewed attention to presentist historicism, the review nonetheless argues for more reflexive and contestatory accounts of the past’s relation to the present.

This essay focuses on the writings of Charles Chesnutt in order to rethink the expressivist and democratizing assumptions about the market that literary historians in the United States have borrowed from classical economics. In particular, it analyzes the discourse of friendship used to describe the continuous and changing social practices of patronage and philanthropy in the era of corporate capitalism. Such friendship calls into question simple conceptions about supply and demand, consumer preference, and the diversifying power of markets. Placing Chesnutt's writings in dialogue with those of Booker T. Washington, the essay analyzes the African American debate over the significance of corporate capitalist friendship. Chesnutt is, on the one hand, intrigued by the language and possibilities of corporate philanthropy. He works to imagine if such friendship can be linked to an older radical discourse of friendship stemming from the revolutionary era. On the other hand, especially in The Colonel's Dream (1905), he finds himself continually frustrated by what corporate philanthropic friendship evades—namely issues of justice. This essay therefore finally challenges assumptions about “free” markets that we have unconsciously relied on in our literary histories, while also showing how a focus on the social practices of patronage and philanthropy helps us ask new questions about the relation of literature to corporate capitalism.

Critics have typically treated Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) either as a portrayal of a dying New England town or, more recently, as a depiction of a powerful but marginalized female community. Both kinds of readings remove the novel from its historical context, thereby overlooking the ways in which Jewett addressed national political issues and debates. By contrast, this essay argues that Jewett's work involves itself in a turn-of-the-century progressive discourse about class conflict and woman's labor. Comparing Jewett's work to Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), the essay shows how upper-class progressive feminists combined ideas from the "cult of domesticity" with new ideas about woman's role as a consumer of culture to imagine themselves as particularly able to understand and transcend difference. For these women, the cultivated lady tourist becomes the model figure who can unite teh divided nation. While this new vision of class conflict and woman's labor did not reverse the hierarchies of the national culture, it did attempt to create a new relation between margin and center, especially a new relation between woman's labor and the larger society.