“Ship-Siblings”:

Globalisation, Neoliberal Aesthetics, and Neo-Victorian Form in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

The history of globalisation and its attendant crises including capital flight, the decline of manufacturing in developed regions, environmental degradation, reduced labour standards, and extreme economic inequality are sometimes seen to be so complex as to defy coherent representation. While postmodernism has been considered as one response to the disaggregation of society under these pressures, the neo-Victorian aesthetic provides an alternative. This article studies how Amitav Ghosh’s Sea Of Poppies (2008) exploits the genre of neo-Victorian fiction, representing an earlier stage of globalisation in order to provide a critique of its unresolved legacy in the neoliberal present.