Cusp Special Cluster on “Cosmopolitanism on the Cusp”
Virginia Woolf famously announced her cosmopolitan aspirations as a rejection of exclusionary patriarchal patriotism by declaring in Three Guineas (1938), “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (TG 229). In this statement Woolf echoed the classical etymology of cosmopolitanism coined by the Cynic Diogenes, according to whom a cosmopolitan is defined as “a citizen of the world” (Martha Nussbaum, Cosmopolitan Tradition 1–2). But how does the classical philosophical notion of cosmopolitanism evolve in late-Victorian and modernist literature in the context of colonialism, capitalism, industrialism, and ever-increasing transnational mobility during the period?