Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature

Literary Content as Artistic Experience

While literary theory in the 21st century is diverse and pluralistic, there is widespread agreement that the analysis of literature should emphasize literary form: critics with very different methodological and political commitments like nevertheless agree on the fundamental importance of formalist analysis. This underlying unity serves well, moreover, as a characterization of the broader twentieth-century history of Anglophone literary theory. The emphasis on form in the New Criticism was ultimately maintained in structuralist criticism, deconstructive criticism, and even the New Historicism. Indeed the depth of the commitment to form is often most apparent in defenses of historicist criticism, which often work not by rejecting formalism but by showing how formalist and historicist analyses complement each other—as they do, for instance, in Fredric Jameson’s influential model, which links formal changes in aesthetic works to changes in underlying political structures. Implicit in all these approaches is the bestowal of a decidedly second-place status on form’s counterpart—namely, content. Yet this denigration of content at the theoretical level is belied by the experience of non-academic readers, many of whom in effect emphasize content over form. And there is a good deal of literary criticism that in practice offers a perfunctory gesture towards formalism, or ignores literary form entirely, and engages primarily the content of literary works. An analysis and defense of this rarely theorized and generally ignored way of reading is overdue.

The need for such an argument becomes especially apparent in the light of the recent debates on ethics and literature. Here, critics attempt to outdo each other in emphasizing literary form, while accusing others of merely reading for the content. Specifically, one finds Derek Attridge, Adam Zachary Newton, and David Parker (among others) criticizing other writers, often Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, for too-simply extracting moral philosophy from literature. But Booth and Nussbaum themselves developed their accounts by distinguishing the effects of literature from moral philosophy, and emphasizing the effects literary texts create through their forms. Correspondingly the formalist assumption—that a stress on literary form at the expense of content defines interpretive practice—goes unchallenged, and the possibility that engagement with philosophical ideas was a crucial element of the reading experience remains unexplored. It is clear that the stress on form has become the primary means of demonstrating one’s subtlety as a critic: no one dares be caught simply “reading for the message,” and to read for the message is to betray some fundamental element of the literary text. This project challenges that attitude, contending that the invocation of philosophical ideas in literary interpretation is not an accident or a violation of the literary nature of a work. Rather, it is an instance of a common experience of reading: one in which a reader finds a book valuable because it says something exciting. The notion that it is forms which create aesthetic effects, while ideas and arguments elicit only agreement or disagreement, does a disservice to both. We can enjoy creative philosophical views even if we don’t agree with them: this is what it means to say a writer is profound.

My argument proceeds by alternating interpretive theory with literary criticism. Formalist criticism is supported by a wide variety of intuitions and arguments, and developing an alternative method requires understanding and explaining this large set of disparate beliefs and meeting the supporting arguments. Three in particular structure this book: first, the widespread position that narratives do not make assertions, and thus cannot be read for their contents; second, the axiom that interpreting narratives from the past requires situating them in the history of literary forms, while dismissing resonance with contemporary issues as anachronistic bias; third, the old idea that to value a work artistically requires valuing its form, and that other forms of enjoyment are not genuinely aesthetic. After each chapter, I offer an example of what literary criticism would look like if it abandoned or reversed the respective methodological assumption.

Introduction: In Defense of Paraphrase

Chapter 1: Form and Content

Chapter 2: Self-Deception, Akrasia, and Ethical Confusion in Anthony Trollope

Chapter 3: Justifying Anachronistic Frames

Chapter 4: The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot and the Sources of Normativity

Chapter 5: Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound

Chapter 6: Robert Browning, Augusta Webster, and the Role of Morality