Victorians in Theory

Each century, wrote Charles Dickins is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before. This book explores the conceit that 19th-century poetry is amazed by 20th century literary tradition. In a departure from critial covention, Schad re-reads poststructuralist 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; Gerard Manley Hopkins dreams Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Helene Cixous. Reading across and between these writers, Schad opens up an intertextual space. Across this no-man's land appear characters such as T.S. Eliot, Martin Luther, Friederich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's angel of history and the women taken in adultery.