A Postmodern Victorian? Lewis Carroll and the Critique of Totalising Reason

Abstract

There is a strand of postmodernist literary criticism that constructs itself as something new: it is something that comes after all those other literary and cultural ‘isms’, such as modernism, Victorianism and Romanticism, whose founding ideas and political dogmas it throws into question with its innovative and advanced critical apparatus. And if the criticism is new, then so is the art. Postmodern art, we are told, makes a profound break from what has gone before: it is variously described as pluralist, fragmentary, intertextual, disruptive, decentering and, perhaps especially, parodic.