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Victorian Literary Criticism
- Cornell University Press
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i n t e r t e x t t h r e e M Victorian Literary Criticism The members of the Browning Society, like the theologians of the Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series, seem to me to spend their time in trying to explain their divinity away. —Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” Victorian literary criticism, a much richer and more complex activity than has sometimes been allowed, is a subject that deserves at least several books of its own. I want here to discuss briefly a few of the key issues that arose when in the late nineteenth century the focus of criticism began to shift from evaluation and judgment to the principles of interpreting literature . I will not be attending to the interesting varieties of criticism whose primary concern is merit or appreciation; nor will I treat criticism interested in formal, generic, and aesthetic properties, for example, J. A. Symonds’s important essay “The Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature” (1890). My subject is rather the revolution in critical approach that led to a new emphasis on interpretation, so I will not be examining specific interpretations of texts to determine the underlying if unexpressed methodologies on which they rely. Instead I will be looking at the ways in which British critics began to theorize explicitly the interpretation of literary texts in the last decades of the century. Widespread, conscious attention to the workings and principles of the interpretation of secular literature was, as I’ve demonstrated, largely new in modern British culture and followed upon the development in hermeneutics that 131 this book has been tracing. Coming into its own at the end of the Victorian period, literary interpretation struggled to define both its rationale and its procedures. Scholarly attention to the institutionalization of English literature has reminded us that the academic study of literature has a short history, with literature entering the universities as a subject only at the end of the nineteenth century. Extensive theorizing on the interpretation of literary texts has an equally short history in modern culture, though its development does not exactly parallel the establishment of the discipline of literary study in the universities. Of course, earlier cultures had been concerned with the interpretation of texts other than the Bible, as we can see, for instance, in Plato’s Ion or in the Stoics’ interpretations of Homer’s epics.1 But an extensive and specifically literary hermeneutics emerges in modern British culture only after it had absorbed German Romantic hermeneutics ’ attempts to formulate general theories of linguistic understanding, and only after the reconception of the Bible as literary text had been accomplished. Only then did literary texts widely attract the methodologically self-conscious theorizing that had long been reserved for sacred or legal texts. The history of this development makes apparent how closely current literary interpretation is modeled on late nineteenth-century literary studies, itself in many ways shaped by biblical exegesis. In the literature of the late Victorian period, we can watch literary interpretation as we practice it today develop in debates on English literature among literary societies and in the texts of the first professors of literature. The abundant criticism that preceded this methodological turn—sufficiently abundant, indeed, to induce Carlyle to remark in 1831 that “by and by it will be found that all Literature has become one boundless selfdevouring Review”2 —was primarily concerned with questions of literary merit and standards of taste. Much of the literary criticism that Carlyle was complaining about in the early nineteenth century followed an eighteenthcentury model and was not concerned with the interpretive processes that underlay critical judgments. Statements on the principles of interpretation were infrequent and usually made only in passing. A number of critics adopted in an offhand way the historicist principles that informed Romantic hermeneutics, philology, and the new criticism of the Bible; so George Henry Lewes (who was surprisingly unconcerned with the problems of textual interpretation, considering George Eliot’s preoccupation with the topic) wrote that the critic must rid himself of “all personal predilection,” since this “enables him to transport himself into the peculiarities of other ages and nations, and to feel them as it were from their central point.”3 Others accepted just as casually that the aim of criticism was to 132 Victorian Interpretation [3.227.239.9] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:10 GMT) understand the great writer’s mind and heart...