The Victorian Poetry Party

The party was signaled by a huge banner in the foyer, "Whither Victorian Poetry?," and by that unmistakable roar of excited conversation—loud, confident, sophisticated, clever. Such a party roar is intimidating to the latecomer. I had a moment of apprehension. What exactly was I doing here? True, I, with a group of colleagues, was meant to draw some conclusions from these conversations. But that did not make me a participant. Was I a kind of oedipal eavesdropper? (Fretfully I realized that a person might be both a latecomer and a precursor figure, the worst of both worlds.) However, I pulled myself together and decided to listen for a while, and then to circulate among those clusters of eager talkers and ask them a few questions.¹

When I entered a wonderful sight met my eyes. Everyone was talking. There was dancing, and some people had come in fancy dress. The Multi-Dimensional Hypertext Line Dance was under way, where people created ever-changing pathways within the group with their bodies. Quite near and sometimes overlapping with it was the Intertextual Network Reel. The principle of this dance was that unless you touched at least two people simultaneously wherever you moved you were forced to drop out. Someone dressed as a satin-lined coffin containing the corpse of the Lyric "I" bumped into me. A beautiful screen-printed costume, covered in upraised pairs of hands signalling inverted commas with each of two fingers, presented itself as "Citation." A £&$ sign floated past, "The Market." Just then some stately Neoformalists began an orderly patterned figure.

Adjusting to the noise I began to distinguish fragments of words, then groups of words, then whole sentences. The prefix "re-" was frequent—reshaping, revising, reiterating, renewing, reinvigorating, revisiting, recovering, recuperating, redefining, reframing. This, given the remit of the question, "Whither Victorian Poetry?" was inevitable but interesting. The future starts with the past, with the doubling and folding back of re-tracing, where erasing becomes a tracing. (Helen Groth was heard quoting Benjamin's subtle remark that the future subsists by looking back.) Every new generation has to remake the terms of its criticism. And "new," of course, featured strongly. New taxonomies, new methodologies, new genealogies, new relationships, new aesthetics, new formalism: all these "news" asked for a fundamental act of restructuring. A series of recurrent words sounded insistently: challenge, expand, intertextual, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, performative, citation, mimicry, parodic, "author function," genre, inter-generic, trans-generic, sub-genres, gender, homoerotic, cultural studies, ideology, marginalized, the market, online database, hypertext, computer technology, networks, the canon, institutionalized. So many of these key words suggest spatial disposition across a surface. The persistent cognitive paradigm is that of the "trans," the crossing.

A sentence emerges from the noise, "We postmodern Victorianists" (Andrew Stauffer). Yes, that's it. Another proclaims a liberating postmodern openness that I was delighted by: " I have . . . taken dismay at an apprehension of banality . . . as an invitation to read more carefully, not to stop" (Lee O'Brien). The consequence of all this is a willingness to read way beyond disciplinary boundaries. How much all these people know. The research breadth is awesome, the documentation frequently breathtaking. As I circled round the groups I was constantly scribbling references at the back of my filofax. I learned an unexpected consequence of this paradoxical combination of openness and professionalism. All these scholars are street-wise about the institutionalization of the subject, the constructedness of the field, and the vagaries of cultural capital. They have read their Bourdieu and John Guillory—and most have experienced the American tenure system. This makes them wary, wary of the successive theory waves that have passed over the subject—feminism, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies. There is a tendency to think of these as designer commodity scholarship rather than forms of knowledge. "We have added women poets to our classes' reading lists," James Najarian said with a certain glumness (though astutely pointing out that we have not added race to Victorian poetry), as...