ELH

Goodlad, Lauren M. E.
'A Middle Class Cut into Two': Historiography and Victorian National Character
ELH - Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 143-178

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Lauren M. E. Goodlad - 'A Middle Class Cut into Two': Historiography and Victorian National Character - ELH 67:1 ELH 67.1 (2000) 143-178 "A Middle Class Cut into Two": Historiography and Victorian National Character Lauren M. E. Goodlad * In a recently published essay, Ruth Perry carves out a distinctive place for literary criticism in the field of cultural history. Unlike the historian, who reads texts without recognizing "the cultural work that literature performs," the critic's purpose is to "de-familiarize" assumptions that are otherwise taken for granted. In a general sense, the following essay comments upon Perry's thesis by assessing current directions in Victorian studies. While critics do indeed strive to de-familiarize a familiar that many (but by no means all) historians continue to reify, it is also the case that the project of critical de-familiarization in either field is often burdened by methodological inconsistency -- in particular, by failures satisfactorily to address incompatibilities between Foucauldian and more generally materialist approaches to cultural analysis. To be sure, recent critics of Victorian culture have dramatically illuminated the study of identity formation. Feminist scholars, in particular, have demonstrated the profundity with which constructions of gender and sexuality are implicated within histories of the political, resulting in a far-reaching transformation of what the political and its history are understood...