CULTURAL STUDIES, VICTORIAN STUDIES, AND FORMALISM

VICTORIAN STUDIES, in its longstanding resistance to the formalist study of Victorian literature, has to an extent been re-enacting the anxiety of mid-Victorian poets and novelists about being entrapped in a world of art. That anxiety notoriously defined the Victorian resistance to their Romantic forebears (think of Tennyson’s and Arnold’s well-documented, ambiguous attitudes toward Wordsworth and Keats or even Dickens’s satire of Leigh Hunt as Skimpole in Bleak House). And, predictably enough, it led to the backlash of the late-century aestheticism. If one positions the anti-formalism of the various genres of historicism and cultural studies now current in the study of Victorian literature as current versions of that Victorian anxiety at being hermetically enclosed in beautiful but empty forms, then surely an aestheticist and formalist backlash is more than overdue. And, rather than taking an analytical or neutrally critical response to this flux and reflux, I intend to espouse just such a backlash. If backlash implies partialness, the potential partiality of formalism is, I think, one of its less recognized values. Indeed, I will argue, a return to a consideration of aesthetic form may, in its recognition of its own limits, return a genuine interdisciplinarity to Victorian studies, if one intends by interdisciplinary studies not the work of literary scholars treating non-literary texts, but the participation of scholars from different disciplines with different and possibly conflicting grounding questions, concerns and modes of analysis in the study of the same subject matter.