On Scholarly Love takes a close look at the state of Victorian
studies by looking at how nineteenth-century novels have come to circulate
within contemporary cultural studies as a particularly problematic type of
currency. The study concerns itself with how the novel has functioned for
two of the most significant recent developments in literary and cultural
theory, postcolonial and queer studies, and it argues that in establishing
themselves through strategic (mis)readings of major nineteenth-century
novels, these schools of thought have effectively established an
understanding of the Victorian novel as a caricature of itself, a scene of
ideology so simplistic and so unselfconscious that it is no longer
interesting except insofar as it can be read as a cipher for the political
and social patterns that defined the world that wrote and read them. For
postcolonial theory, that caricature has its origins in Jane Eyre,
whose plot has become paradigmatic of how the novel helped to consolidate a
culture of imperialism. For queer theory, that caricature has its origins
less in a specific text than in an approach to texts that levels the
differences among them in order to turn them into scenes of either queer or
homophobic sensibility. The book concludes with an analysis of how the
language of love circulates in contemporary debates about the state of the
profession, arguing that the nineteenth-century marriage plot has become a
structuring narrative for our present debates about the meaning of literary
study.
Read the introduction here.