Victorians in Theory

<p>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 Hélène Cixous. <br>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.<br>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.</p>