"Each century," wrote Charles Dickens "[is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before." Victorians in theory explores the startling conceit that nineteenth-century poetry is amazed by twentieth-century literary theory. In a daring and exciting departure from critical convention, Schad re-reads postructuralist theory through Victorian poetry. Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerald Manley Hopkins dreams with Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Helene Cixous.
Reading both across and between these writers, Schad opens up a radically intertextual space; he wanders, in Matthew Arnold's words, "between two worlds." Across this no-man's land appear a host of unlikely specters, among them T. S. Eliot, Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's "angel of history," and the woman taken in adultery.
This book will fascinate anyone interested in the Victorians or theory; at once rigorous and readable, it will appeal to both the scholar and the student.
- ISBN10 0719051347
- ISBN13 9780719051340
- Publish Date 28 January 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 28 May 2004
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 192
- Language English