Abstract
This book reads Victorian poetry within the context of a radical shift over the last 150 years in the key European model for human definition and experience: from the metaphor of self to the metaphor of text. The movement in thought from Hegel to Derrida produces a shift in the dominating metaphor for human experience from consciousness as self (there is nothing outside self) to consciousness as writing (there is nothing outside text). When placed within this changing process of mediation, Victorian poetry develops the problematics of selfhood, pursuing a post-Romantic displacement of the self as an originary guarantor of meaning and truth.
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Notes
For a recent study which considers these issues in terms of Victorian writing, see John P. McGowan, Representation and Revelation: Victorian Realism from Carlyle to Yeats (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986).
See, e.g., Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge University Press, 1980), chap. 3.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 79–80.
Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Sussex: Harvester, 1982).
So far the closest study to these views is Loy D. Martin’s Browning’s Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Martin states, for instance, that ‘the dramatic monologue, more perhaps than any other literary form, challenges the immense prestige of the Cartesian dualism of the self and the other’ (p. 28).
Dorothy Mermin, The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 9.
Tilottama Rajan, ‘Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness’, in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), pp. 194–207.
See Robert E. Lougy, ‘The Sounds and Silence of Madness: Language as Theme in Tennysons’s Maud’, VP, vol. 22 (1984), 407–26.
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© 1991 E. Warwick Slinn
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Slinn, E.W. (1991). Introduction. In: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10452-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10452-9_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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