Toward a Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Fantasy Criticism

Abstract

Since we live in a period of fashionably arcane literary theory — a time in which writing and reading have folded in upon themselves as intransitive verbs, a time in which texts are ‘in’ psyches or interpretive communities but not between two covers — it is arguably anachronistic for anyone to offer a definitive rhetoric of anything, let alone a critical stance. With the identities of authors and readers in dispute and the stability of texts suspect, few of us may feel comfortable — professionally, at least — coming down on the side of any normative method of textual analysis. Two unmistakably positive effects of this confusion in critical theories of the past decade have been the undermining of our entrenched formalism, and the concomitant opening of the canon to works and genres previously kept at arm’s distance. Clearly among these neglected works are fantasy and science-fiction texts from nineteenth-century Britain whose status has been overshadowed in this century by the New Criticism’s preoccupation with the quasi-realisms of Dickens, Austen, and the Brontë sisters. With the decreasing dominance of the method of explication de texte, and the de rigeur rejection of the international and affective fallacies, new tools and new criteria also are emerging for analyzing and evaluating texts — as the recent influx of feminist and Marxist maps of the new critical landscape would suggest.¹