Theory of Victorian Studies: Anachronism and Self-Reflexivity

I begin with a topic that seems scarcely theoretical, the relations between Victorian studies as a field and Victorian Studies, the journal. These relations have been institutionalized by the decision—which I heartily endorse—to bundle the price of a subscription to Victorian Studies into the membership fee of the new North American Victorian Studies Association. The effect has been to constitute membership in NAVSA around the material practice of serial publication. The journal's quarterly arrival, its formal divisions, and its weight and bulk as a series of individual numbers extending along a bookshelf—each of these facts forms part of the life of NAVSA members. Until very recently, the same could be said about many associations of academic humanists; the founding of NAVSA, however, takes place in the context of far-reaching changes in the forms of scholarly publishing and communication. The role of the print journal in the association could, for instance, have been performed by a listserv, a decision that would have had profound effects on the communications between its members. Even given the decision to link NAVSA with a scholarly journal, the journal's distribution to the entire membership in print seems increasingly anomalous. More and more readers of scholarly journals access them online, either through individual subscriptions or more commonly through site licenses. Besides its implications for the economics of journal publication, this development is transforming the temporal organization of scholarly exchange, along with the forms of intertextuality and citation by which scholarly texts are linked to one another. The association of NAVSA with a print journal establishes specific—and arguably anachronistic—practices of reading and writing as the material basis of its members' collective identity.

When Victorian Studies was founded in 1957 the quarterly journal was entering a three-decade-long golden age as an academic institution. In the previous epoch of scholarly publishing in the humanities, the major American scholarly journals were established as organs of learned societies—the American Journal of Philology in 1880; the PMLA in 1884; The American Historical Review in 1895; the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association in 1928, to name only a few. These journals were necessarily devoted to work in their sponsoring disciplines. During the postwar boom in American universities, however, many institutions used their growing resources to support new journals, which unlike their predecessors had no constitutive disciplinary affiliations. Journals founded in this period published much of the most influential humanities scholarship in the United States in the last four decades of the twentieth century, in a development that arguably culminated in the founding of the journals Critical Inquiry, at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, and Representations, at Berkeley in the 1980s.

Like Victorian Studies itself, many of the journals of this period were dedicated to interdisciplinary work—a dedication that reflected both their emancipation from the disciplinary societies of the previous generation and their immersion in the institutions of the mid- twentieth-century university. Victorian Studies was of course founded at Indiana University, where it continues to be edited and published to this day. Here are some sentences from the "Prefatory Note" that introduced its inaugural issue in 1957:

Victorian Studies has two distinguishing features: concentration on the English culture of a particular age; and openness to critical and scholarly studies from all the relevant disciplines. . . . Victorian Studies hopes to capture something of the life of [an] era, to discuss its events and personalities, and to interpret and appraise its achievement.

This hope is more likely to be realized through the coordination of academic disciplines than in departmental isolation.

(1: 3)

The antithesis in the last sentence of this passage between "coordination of academic disciplines" and "departmental isolation" tells us that the disciplines have here been understood as institutionalized in university departments, and also that it is to the problem of the university department that Victorian Studies responds with its advocacy of interdisciplinary scholarship...