Victorians in theory : from Derrida to Browning

"Each century", wrote Charles Dickins "[is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before." This book explores the conceit that 19th-century poetry is amazed by 20th century literary tradition.

In a departure from critial covention, Schad re-reads poststructuralist theory through Victorian poetry.

Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerard Manley Hopkins dreams Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Helene Cixous.

Reading across and between these writers, Schad opens up an intertextual space.

Across this no-man's land appear characters such as T.S.

Eliot, Martin Luther, Friederich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" and the women taken in adultery.