The past decade has witnessed a wealth of new attention to poetry in the Victorian periodical press, including newspapers, magazines, and literary annuals and other gift-books. 1 Dwelling more at the border of periodical and book production, the travel guidebook pioneered by the firm of John Murray III (1808-92) has been largely overlooked in this effort, and yet these handbooks included numerous poetic extracts. While literary critics and book historians have studied the Murray guidebooks and the ways they incorporated literary references, they have not fully considered how Murray's unique kind of literary travel anthology, generally reissued on a biennial basis, functioned within a periodical space of production and consumption. 2 Previous critical attention has likewise stressed the damage this extraction performed on the meaning and significance of the poems themselves: guidebook Byron, for instance, served mostly to provide a ready source of cultural capital that distinguished more literary-minded travelers from mere "tourists." 3 By refocusing our attention on the evolving periodical contexts and spaces in which the poetic content of the handbooks was presented and consumed, I aim to construct a different critical narrative that, following Caley Ehnes in her recent study of poetry and Victorian periodicals, questions "the divide between popular, mass-produced literature and the reified poetry of small-run poetry volumes." 4 Rather than removing poetry from a more authentic private sphere of volume publication, the Murray handbooks readapted an already mobile, periodical genre to the unique social, textual, and geographical spaces that coemerged with new technologies, texts, and social patterns of travel in the early Victorian

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The articles included in “Victorian Internationalisms” stress how attention to geopolitical contexts beyond those associated with imperialism can enrich our understanding of the Victorian engagement with the wider world. At the same time, they largely resist the temptation to recast Victorian cultural production within the often valorized rhetoric of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. They reveal instead, for instance, the subtle ways in which national self-interest could overlap with humanitarian concerns or how British authors such as Oscar Wilde both welcomed and resisted the influence of French literature and culture. “Victorian Internationalisms” likewise draws renewed attention to the category of the “literary” itself as a discursive space perhaps uniquely suited to dramatizing the complexities of geopolitical involvement

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