Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century

Initially I had planned to write as little as possible by way of an opening assessment of recent developments and trends. Instead, I thought, I would merely offer up a series of accounts of the various scholarly books that have recently been published in the field and would preface these with the usual implied limited warranty (too many books, too little time, etc.). It turns out, however, that I have begun to think that I discern some patterns in the movements of recent critical work. Given the fact that there has been a great deal of controversy over whether or not deconstructive critics are corrupters of youth and despoilers of literature, I have been surprised to discover how very few of the current critical books are directly influenced by deconstructive theory. I have also been startled that feminist criticism has scant representation among the year's critical books. Although it is hard to pinpoint the influence of any particular school of criticism, recent critical writing seems to be tending in the direction of leaving youth uncorrupt (or no more corrupt than before) but of despoiling literature - in one sense, at least. Recent critical writing, that is, clearly takes a new kind of subject matter to be increasingly appropriate for criticism, and is concerned as often as not with literature-for-the-sake-of-social-concerns rather than with literature qua literature. Whereas critics once wrote as though it were important to describe the literary work at hand in such a way as to make it clear that it possessed the attributes of great or good art (unity, ambiguity, and so forth), many critics today seem more interested in what would have appeared peripheral only a decade ago. They are interested, in short, in the circumstantial. The literature of circumstance, as embodied in the novels of Trollope and Scott, has become more highly prized; and literary studies of the circumstances of literary production are ever more frequent. Virginia Woolf wrote of her aunt, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, She will