Introduction to On Scholarly Love

With the publication of his New Poems in 1867, Matthew Arnold gave up poetry to write criticism. A poet at heart, he had gradually come to believe that he was living in an age that was incapable of producing truly great literature, a position he had forcefully voiced in his 1864 essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." Imagining that no modern English writer would attain the level of a Shakespeare or a Goethe as long as English culture continued to be the frenetic, pragmatic, progress-oriented thing it had become by the middle years of the nineteenth century, Arnold argued that with their persistent pragmatism and their total lack of that essential critical faculty, curiosity, the English had lost their ability to produce or appreciate literature. Arnold went on to articulate his theory about how things could be changed. More interested in doing business than in entertaining ideas, more attuned to the hideous rhythms of journalism than to the musical meter of well-turned lines, the English would not write well until they began to think well about writing. And the way to begin to get English people to think about writing was to write well about good writing-in other words, to write criticism. The function of criticism at the present time was, for Arnold, as important as it was subordinate: its job was to act as a placeholder and a pathfinder, to make a better poetry possible by bringing some much-needed intellectual tone to a culture so slack it was almost incapable of recognizing its slackness for what it was. The essay acted as a mission statement for Arnold. Shortly after publishing it, he backed up his thesis by turning from poetry to critique. For the next two decades, he wrote and lectured and taught his vision, becoming one of the foremost critics of his age and in the process becoming synonymous with his age.¹

We remember Arnold-when we do remember him-as one of those critics who gave humanism a bad name, a man whose na•ve belief in universal standards of beauty were almost single-handedly responsible for the conservatism and complacency of so much twentieth-century criticism. Underneath the mantle of taste, Arnold forwarded a notion of culture so exclusive that it was basically closed to any who were not like him. Women, workers, people of color-none had a place in Arnold's discriminating vision.² A crusader against crudity of thought, Arnold has come down to us as the crudest of ideologues, the father of a belletristic tradition whose moral and aesthetic myopia has only recently begun to be redressed. But I like to remember Arnold as the man who gave up what he loved that others might someday write the poetry he could only dream of writing. And I like to think of him as right-I like to imagine that his muscular insistence on a more thoroughgoing literary and cultural theory helped create the intellectual milieu that gave rise to modernist poetry half a century later.³ What moves me about Arnold is not his narrow notion of culture, nor his restricted sense of literature as a tradition inhabited entirely by white, western male verse, nor even his own verse, but his deep belief in the importance of writing beautifully and his equally deep belief in the power of criticism to help beautiful writing come into being-a belief so deep that it led him to sacrifice his poetic career out of a sense of responsibility for the future of poetry, and a belief so true that it played out just as Arnold would have wanted, in the emergence of a totally new artistic era. As an exemplary instance of praxis, Arnold's career challenges us to question our own ideas about what criticism is and what it is for.

I have often wondered what the generic relations Arnold articulated so forcefully in 1864 have to tell us about our own critical moment. Specifically, I have wondered whether, if Arnold were alive and writing today, he might not decide that criticism is the genre we are currently incapable of writing well. And I have wondered what he would advise as the best way to bring a more vital, meaningful criticism into being. Would he give up criticism to write poetry? Would he write poems about the need for a good criticism? Would he say we need to revive criticism with criticism? Such curiosity may seem initially to be misplaced. After all, criticism's claims to social and political relevance have never been stronger. More and more academics write with an eye on ideology, and more and more evidence is being amassed to support the notion that literature1s real importance lies not in the beauty it embodies or the pleasure it gives, but in the insight it offers into how cultures use symbolic structures to naturalize their hegemonic arrangements. And yet it is just this increasingly normative assumption that the work of the literary critic is to comment on politics-an assumption that depends on the equally problematic assumption that literary texts offer comparatively transparent access to the political configurations of their time-that makes me wonder whether we haven't as a body written ourselves into a hole every bit as deep as Arnold's poets had, and that makes me wish, as perhaps only a hardened Victorianist can, that Arnold-that impossibly idealistic champion of "disinterestedness"-were available for comment.⁴

For the rote character of so much of our present reasoning about professional purpose-its incessant almost mantra-like invocation of the raceclassandgender refrain, its insistent certainty that to hook literary study into a present-centered effort to contribute to progressive movements for change is not only possible but desirable, and its aggressive tendency to dismiss as apolitical or even reactionary work that does not claim to be some sort of social commentary-the rote character of this reasoning reminds me of that other genre that rode itself complacently into the ground rather than rethink itself, Victorian poetry. We should not be misled by the activist idiom of so much of our criticism-that we like to say we are doing politically significant work does not mean we are. It could just as easily suggest that we are confused about what it means to study literature, and further that we are so accustomed to mask that confusion with a self-assured rhetoric of intervention that we no longer reliably experience our confusion as such.⁵ In this context, Arnold's ideas about how a brilliant criticism might revitalize a lackluster literature read to me as a lesson in historically responsible thinking about genre. Insofar as it represents an attitude toward criticism that is profoundly different from our own, it has much to tell us about our own uncertain professional moment, one whose elaborate claims for relevance tend all too often to mask a genre that has lost its way, and whose revival depends, paradoxically, on the creation of a criticism willing to critique contemporary critique.

Criticism's mission has of course long been the subject of an energetic and wide-ranging discussion. Currently, opinion seems to fall into two roughly opposed camps. There are the reactionary old-schoolers who believe in the inherent aesthetic value of literature and view the rise of political criticism as the death of literary study.⁶ And there are the hip activists who argue that since all ideas about literature are political, one had best wear one's politics on one's sleeve and join the ranks of radical theorists committed to change.⁷ Though each camp tends to see the other as deeply misguided-the one because it embraces a decadent, dangerously naive notion of what makes a literary work "great," the other because it subordinates, or even ignores, aesthetics in favor of politics-the sides are far from evenly matched. A politicized literary criticism has become the norm, and fewer and fewer scholars are questioning either the wisdom of this trend, or the terms upon which the trend is gaining momentum. It is not my intention to take sides in this debate; nor is it my aim to outline a program for the future of literary studies in the U.S. On the contrary, the goal of this book is far more circumscribed: to trace the implications of the rise of political criticism for nineteenth-century studies by analyzing the nineteenth-century British novel's foundational role in the rise of contemporary cultural critique. What literary study can contribute to cultural critique has been the subject of much discussion. What can happen to literary study when it becomes the provenance of cultural critique has received less-and less successful-attention.⁸ What troubles me about the move to politicize literary study is not the impulse itself, but how the urgency of that impulse can pre-empt a careful reconciliation of the practical concerns of activism with the necessarily free-ranging "curiosity"-the word is Arnold's-of criticism. What troubles me, in other words, is how ready so many literary scholars are to write and teach as if literary study is not only not meaningful, but morally questionable, if it is not absorbed within a rhetoric of interrogation, subversion, and change. Attempts to lend literary study a kind of activist cachet involve all too often a political one-upmanship that goes against the free inquiry the academy ostensibly stands for. Even more basically, such attempts too often assume that literary study is only valuable insofar as it illuminates ideology or advances the cause of resistance. They assume, in other words, that literary texts are not to be read but to be used, that they are a means to an end that ultimately has very little to do with literature itself. The case of the nineteenth-century novel is a telling one in this regard.

In the beginning, the novel enjoyed a symbiotic relation to politically aware literary criticism. The work of Nina Auerbach, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar shows how inseparable early feminist literary history and nineteenth-century literary history were; the foundational Marxist work of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton is similarly entwined with the nineteenth-century novel; and Foucault's ideas about Victorian patterns of discourse, power, discipline, and desire-while famously blind to fiction as a discursive form-nevertheless infused critics as diverse as D.A. Miller, John Kucich, and Nancy Armstrong with seemingly unbounded critical insight. But then something happened. The watershed years of the late 1970s and 1980s-years that saw the publication of such major and original work as Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon (1982), Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Catherine Gallagher's The Industrial Reformation of English Literature (1987), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, John Kucich's Repression in Victorian Fiction (1988), D.A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988), and Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments (1988)-have left a long and ugly drought in their wake. There has been no comparably major study of nineteenth-century fiction for the past ten years and the bulk of the work being done is patently derivative, devoted to recapitulating and extending ideas laid down over a decade ago, rather than to continuing its tradition of innovation. The result is a field sorely lacking in direction. Over the past ten years, no new stars have emerged, and many our most gifted and prominent critics have abandoned the novel for other pursuits. Here I number Gilbert and Gubar (who have become erstwhile modernists), D.A. Miller (who has reinvented himself as a queer theorist), Mary Poovey (whose recent studies of the social body and the fact mark her emergence as a historian), and Catherine Gallagher (for whom, appropriately, the novel has become nobody's story). And yet, even as the energy of nineteenth-century literary studies has flagged, the nineteenth-century novel has become increasingly important to our extremely lively ongoing debates about what criticism is and ought to be.

So central is the novel's place in debates about disciplinarity, politics, and professional purpose that it has anchored two of the most important movements in recent literary and cultural theory: postcolonial and queer studies. This book returns to the moment during the mid-1980s when each of these strands of thought took on its current contours. It studies how in work such as Gayatri Spivak's "Three Women1s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men these movements set their theoretical agendas via programmatic readings of nineteenth-century novels.⁹ And it argues that this tactical use of the novel has proved immensely damaging to the field by vastly restricting our understanding of how that novel works, why it matters, and what we might be able to learn from it. It is as if the expatriation of so many of the nineteenth-century novel's leading figures left the field unguarded and ripe for takeover-certainly there has been a substantial change in the type and tenor of the work being done there, and certainly, too, that change can be explained as the predictable result of a field that, in losing its bearings, is readier to copy paradigms than to invent them, more likely to follow than to lead. At its most basic level, then, this book seeks to show that what we think of as the "Victorian novel" cannot be separated from critical approaches to the novel (as obvious as this may seem, it is a truth we have yet to assimilate fully). At its most ambitious level, this book seeks to open a discussion about how our most carefully cultivated theories might be doing more to bury literary study than to keep it alive. Because the Victorian novel has been so essential to recent critical thought, it provides both a telling testing ground for the limits of literary theory and the urgent case of a literature that has been almost wholly co-opted by theory. The emergency of this book-it would be an understatement to call it an aim-is finally the emergency of a criticism that needs desperately to assess what we are losing when we pressure any work of literature to serve our own political ends.

My argument is thus as narrowly focused and as far-reaching as Arnold's: where Arnold was concerned to show how English culture had bankrupted its poetic tradition, my argument has to do with how certain trends in contemporary cultural criticism threaten to bankrupt the nineteenth-century novel. Unlike the critical patterns I examine, my intention is not to provide a model or a theory of the nineteenth-century novel, but rather to trouble that project by showing how we have made that novel work for us, by showing how, in "theorizing" it, we have used it to focus our frustrations with the past and to script our hopes for a better (read enlightened) future. Postcolonial and queer theory both define their mission and their method by way of a particular take on how the nineteenth-century novel participates in the production of knowledge about empire and desire: where the one targets the novel as an ideologically inferior Other, the space where, more than any other, imperialism was naturalized, the other frames the novel as a principal, if covert, player in the formulation of "queer" identities. These takes are drastically different in their assumptions about what the novel is and does, the one giving the novel little to no credit for knowing either itself or its world, the other ascribing to it a positively uncanny, if essentially unconscious, erotic omniscience. Together, they pose the problem of the nineteenth-century novel as the problem of how that novel has been, and could be, read, suggesting that postcolonial and queer readings of nineteenth-century fiction point to neither its native imperialism nor to its repressed homoeroticism, but, rather, to its terrific availability to criticism of any stamp.¹⁰ In this light, the nineteenth-century novel begins to look less like a genre whose ideological terrain is being accurately mapped, and more like a problem for a criticism whose ability to grapple productively with it is persistently marred by a compulsion to use it for launching new analytical styles.

I should qualify my argument here by noting that I am not advocating a regression to new criticism or an escape to either an ahistorical deconstruction or a sterile psychoanalysis. Nor am I saying that "culture," however we define it, should not be a central concern in any effort to do literary criticism. But I am saying that it ought not to determine our thinking about Victorian fiction as much as it has; that it ought not to overshadow or even displace the more immediate aesthetic, generic, and even biographical questions that the Victorian novel-that great bad art-poses for criticism, for fiction, and, yes, for culture. I am saying, in other words, that what we are doing when we read Victorian novels needs re-evaluation, that we have to let the novel be the novel, and that we need to break our habit of justifying our interest in it by making it be about other things.

The novel was not obviously on Arnold's mind when he sketched his manifesto for a more searching criticism and a more inspired literature. His examples all come from poetry, and he never even mentions Dickens, let alone the then-thriving tradition of Victorian fiction.¹¹ And yet the novel does hover behind his argument, serving as a focal point for his merciless shredding of Victorian taste even as he refuses to acknowledge that the novel is a crucial component of the mid-Victorian literary scene. As an example of how debased English culture has become, Arnold cites the recent newspaper coverage of a case of infanticide: " `A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.'" Two things annoy Arnold about this notice: the casual erasure-"short, bleak, and inhuman"-of the suspect's gender in the phrase "Wragg is in custody," and the name "Wragg" itself. "Wragg!," he exclaims; "has anyone reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the most delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,-Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!" (40). Arnold might have added to this list "Cheggs," "Peggotty," "Pardiggle," "Miggs," or "Wegg," all Dickensian names, and all signs, if we accept Arnold's equation of ugly names with cultural degradation, of a direct, deliberate, and ongoing extension of that degradation to the novel. Silas Wegg, the one-legged ballad-seller in Our Mutual Friend, was making monthly appearances in All the Year Round at the very moment that Arnold was complaining about the spiritual poverty inscribed in English surnames.¹²

As these examples suggest, Arnold's offended ear was ultimately responding as much to novels as to newspaper notices. Indeed, part of what makes his brief account of Wragg's criminal record so powerful is the allusive quality of the name Wragg itself, which had been immortalized just two years before in Wilkie Collins' No Name. The suave swindler Captain Wragge and his eternally down-at-heel wife were two of Collins' best-loved characters. Dickens wrote that "there are some touches in the Captain which none but a born (and cultivated) writer could get near" and called Mrs. Wragge "a really great achievement."¹³ Lewis Carroll was so taken with Mrs. Wragge that he modeled the White Queen after the gentle, untidy, lady giant. But for Arnold, "Wragg" signifies not a literary feat but a prosaic sensibility so dull that it can hardly be called a sensibility at all. As such, Arnold's frustration with the quality of modern news reporting veils a more particular contempt for a genre whose realist impulse brings it into close and formative contact with current events: narrative fiction. Arnold's slyly opportunistic equation of No Name and the novel was in this sense quite inspired-sensation fiction, the sub-genre Collins practically invented in 1860 with The Woman in White and the category to which No Name belongs, drew many of its plot lines from the papers. That Arnold's low opinion of the novel should be buried beneath his contempt for contemporary journalism becomes, in this light, strangely just. Since the novel is essentially continuous with journalism, it need not, indeed it cannot, be considered independently as a legitimate literary form. The irony here is that what Arnold represses on the level of content returns on the level of form: the plot of his essay is that of the bildungsroman, and the story it tells is the uplifting one of a down and out poetry that will only come into its own under the disciplinary rule of a criticism kind enough to adopt it. "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" is in this sense a sort of poetical man's Great Expectations.

As with Arnold, so with us: the novel underwrites our efforts to write cultural criticism even as it has ceased to command our collective interest and respect. Where Arnold sealed his argument about the decline of English literature by suppressing the rise of the novel, we have made the novel into a proving ground for our own arguments about literary criticism's political importance. And in this, we can see ourselves as the unconscious legatees of a moment in literary history from which we have gone to great lengths to distance ourselves. What, finally, is the difference between a criticism that secures its disinterested status by refusing to interest itself in the novel, and a criticism that establishes its interestedness by pressing the novel into the service of those interests? Not much: though the one ignores the novel and the other focuses on it obsessively, neither sees it as a vital field of inquiry in its own right, a genre worthy of respectful study and continued creative thought. Moreover, each is strangely determined by the novel form. As I will go on to show, current accounts of criticism1s mission are, like Arnold's, dogged by the very plots they attempt to deconstruct. Postcolonial and queer literary histories are both narrated along the lines of the very stories they read as producing imperialist and closeted mentalities.¹⁴ Even wider debates about the profession of English-debates that have no immediate connection to nineteenth-century fiction-draw on notions of love, honor, commitment, and redemptive suffering that come straight out of the marriage plots many of us were weaned on. In asking what it is about the nineteenth-century novel that draws us to use it as we have, this book attempts to revive interest in a literature that has for too long been flattened into dullness by criticism that is more interested in pushing its agenda than in listening to the stories it reads. My hope is to breathe some life back into the flagging field of nineteenth-century British studies by reading in a way that responds to the novel's wonderful idiosyncrasy, genuine intelligence, formal particularity, and historical specificity.¹⁵

In order to begin to articulate some alternative perspectives on what the nineteenth-century novel might be to us, I have divided the book into three two-chapter sections. In the first two sections, I read postcolonial and queer theory through their critical investments in the nineteenth-century novel. My goal will be to show how each of these theories authorizes itself through a strategic misrepresentation of selected nineteenth-century novels, the one by a reductive equation of plot with ideology (so that, for instance, Rochester's incarceration of his first wife becomes an allegory of imperialism), the other by a similarly problematic inflation of minor details into symptoms of a covert yet systematic queerness (so that, for example, the many references to men's hands in Great Expectations indicate the novel1s closeted-or pocketed-fascination with desire between men).¹⁶ In each case, a predetermined political position licenses a certain reading practice. In each case, too, that reading practice reconfirms the analytical premises behind it: reading Jane Eyre as a vulgarly naive allegory of empire justifies a programmatically simplistic interpretation; reading Great Expectations as fundamentally queer licenses a flamboyantly overstated interpretation designed to bring out the text's hidden meanings. My hope is that reconstructing the uses to which postcolonial and queer theorists have put the nineteenth-century novel will loosen the grip those theories have on the novel.

In keeping with this hope, my readings of theory are each paired with strategic re-readings of select novels. The chapter on postcolonial approaches to nineteenth-century fiction is followed by a chapter that revisits the question of empire in Jane Eyre. In the one, I show how Gayatri Spivak's 1985 essay, "Three Women1s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," set the terms for postcolonial theories of the novel by way of a sketchy and undeveloped reading of Bronte's novel. In the other, I show that Bronte's use of the concept of the rebel slave was neither as unselfconscious nor as ideologically transparent as the reams of post-Spivakian writing on the novel would have us believe, that, in fact, it formed a knowing extension and (harsh) evaluation of a trope Bronte had long used in private to describe herself. Likewise, the chapter on queer approaches to the nineteenth-century novel is followed by a reading of Dickens' Pickwick Papers, a novel whose celebration of all-male society would seem to make it a perfect candidate for the emergent queer canon. The chapter concentrates, however, on the fact that Pickwickhas been virtually ignored by queer theorists, and it uses this oversight to question the terms upon which queer criticism has chosen the texts it wants to "out."

The standard monograph on nineteenth-century British fiction opens with a theoretical introduction that states a problem and outlines a method for illuminating that problem; its subsequent chapters tend to consist of readings that work together to elaborate the claims laid out in the introduction. The tendency of such a form is to turn textual analysis into an exercise in redundant verification: under the guise of developing a consistent argument, this work threatens at every point to relax into a numbing repetition of predictable, pre-packaged points whose only variety is the metonymic one supplied by the movement from one text to the next.¹⁷ The task of this book, by contrast, is to register at every point how substantive methodology is, how easily it ceases to be a tool and becomes its own subject matter. This means that close reading readings of the novel will be as important to this book as close reading novels. It also means that I try-to the extent that such a thing is possible-to let the fiction lead my reading, and to adapt my approach as the situation requires. I counter postcolonial generalizations about Jane Eyre's imperial ideology, for instance, with a minutely particular analysis of that novel as a pivotal moment in Bronte's personal life. And I respond to queer theory's microscopically close readings with a microscopically close reading of the word "queer" in that most neglected of homosocial novels, The Pickwick Papers. In each case, close reading becomes a solution instead of a symptom. Where a minutely biographical reading of Jane Eyre allows me to place Bronte's use of the slave motif as a conscious effort to re-write herself, a close reading of Pickwick's concept of queerness reveals it to be a keyword in the novel's ongoing anxiety about reading too closely. The results in each case are triply rewarding, yielding insight into how certain critical methodologies have overwritten the novel, showing how the novel has nonetheless played a formative role in shaping these methodologies, and offering examples of how to extricate this fiction from the paradigms that have established themselves through it.

The final section of the book turns from the specific cases of postcolonial and queer studies to a more general consideration of how the marriage plot has become one of the central structuring and containing devices of the profession of English. Showing how the language of love circulates in contemporary debates about the meaning of literary study, I argue that, like the Victorian heroine who sacrifices social position and familial approval to be with her man, we are socialized to prove our "love" for literature by tolerating the financial hardship, the uncertain future, and the social disrepute that so often comes with contemporary academic life.¹⁸ From there, I shift to a rereading of one of academe's favorite love stories, the real-life illicit "marriage" of George Henry Lewes and Marian Evans. Though this relationship has been narrated countless times, it continues to be narrated much as Lewes and Evans narrated it in their letters and diaries-as a sacred bond whose perfect love allowed the genius "George Eliot" to be born. I suggest that the relationship continues to be narrated in this way because of the need within the academy for stories of professedly perfect, profoundly scholarly love. Built around two fantasies-the fantasy of a love founded on a shared need for reading and writing, and the fantasy of a man who willingly, even happily, subordinated his own ambition to nourish his wife's great talent-the story of the Evans-Lewes partnership appeals because it powerfully images the kind of love so many academics seek, a love based in no small part on shared intellectual interests, a love capable of absorbing without rancor or jealousy the inevitable inequities of success, and, most importantly, a love that finds its ultimate fulfillment in scholarship itself.¹⁹

I conclude by offering an alternative reading of the Evans-Lewes liaison, noting that before he became Marian Evans' mentor, Lewes had tried-and failed-to adopt Charlotte Bronte. "George Eliot" was not the first talented, plain, aging spinster that Lewes sought to mold into his ideal novelist; only a few years before meeting her he had attempted to insinuate himself into Bronte's good graces, inviting himself, on the strength of his positive review of Jane Eyre, to become her literary advisor, and hectoring her about her style of realism and her obligations as a woman writer until she was heartily sick of him. Shortly after the publication of Villette, Lewes assumed with Marian Evans the managerial role he had not been able to assume with Bronte, steering her toward fiction, vetting her drafts, cheering her on, screening her reviews, and acting as her agent with publishers. A successful completion of Lewes' unfinished work with Bronte, the relationship was structured in telling ways by Bronte's fiction. When Lewes and Evans eloped, they said they passed through "Villette" on their way to Weimar, and when Lewes read Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, he rejoiced that Gaskell had supplied his soon-to-be-novel-writing lover with a character she could emulate. Small wonder, then, that the newborn George Eliot sought inspiration in The Professor while writing "Janet's Repentance," the concluding novella in her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life; or that the pseudonym "Eliot" recalls Jane Eyre's own assumed name. My point in offering this admittedly speculative interpretation is not to overturn the existing love story, but to remind us that the existing story is a story, and to suggest that it continues to enjoy a sort of epic authority because it embodies, in some essential way, a story we want to be able to tell ourselves about who and what we are.

Footnotes:

¹For a biographical analysis of this move, see Ian Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (New York, 1999).

²See Bill Bell, "The Function of Arnold at the Present Time," Essays in Criticism (July 1997), 203-20, for a thorough review of how Arnold became the poster boy for reactionary thinking about culture. Recent efforts to reclaim Arnold for socially responsible critique include Timothy Peltason, "The Function of Matthew Arnold at the Present Time," College English (November 1994), 749-66 and Eugene Goodheart, "Arnold, Critic of Ideology," New Literary History (Spring 1994), 415-29.

³Arnold1s vexed but pivotal role in modernist self-fashioning is exemplified by T.S. Eliot1s ambivalence toward the Victorian sage. On the one hand, as essays such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" make clear, Eliot was a direct descendant of Arnoldian thought. On the other hand, Eliot never missed an opportunity to belittle what he saw as Arnold1s stuffiness. See Adam Kirsch, "Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot," American Scholar (Summer 1998): 65-74.

⁴The term is from Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1993): 37. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

⁵John Guillory argues as much in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago 1993), as does David Simpson in The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago 1995). In Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 1987), Gerald Graff argues that our present conflict about our mission is merely the most recent manifestation of an institutional confusion that has characterized the profession since its inception over one hundred years ago.

⁶For a sampling of this work, see Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (New York, 1995), Mark Bauerlein, Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (Philadelphia 1997), and John Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven 1997).

⁷For a sampling of this work, see Michael Berube, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (London, 1993), and Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York, 1997).

⁸Most attempts to outline the negative impact of political criticism on literary study tend to come off as hopelessly reactionary . Certainly some areÜsee, for example, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education (Chicago 1998). Others simply lack an effective vocabulary for combating the totalizing tendencies of politicization. See, for example, Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York 2000).

⁹For examples of work that follows Spivak, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993), Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women1s Fiction (Ithaca 1993), Deirdre David, Rule, Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, 1995), Suvendrini Perera, The Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York, 1991), and Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire (Minneapolis, 1993). For examples of work that follows Sedgwick, see Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, 1997), William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, 1996), and Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexuality in English Discourse, 1850-1920 (Berkeley, 1994), and Sedgwick's own Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990). I omit D.A. Miller from this list as his relation to Victorian queer theory is more complex than Sedgwick's. Though his work on the Victorian novel is not overtly committed to developing a queer hermeneutics, his powerful talent for defamiliarizing novels through the closest of close readings has set the tone for queer Victorian studies-not least, I should add, because Sedgwick models many of her own ideas about reading after Miller's. I will discuss Miller's work in detail in chapter four.

¹⁰This point is most forcefully made when postcolonial and queer criticisms converge, unbeknownst to one another, on the same novels. See, for example, Susan Meyer's chapter "'The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life': The Costs of History's Progress in The Mill on the Floss" and William A. Cohen1s chapter, "Schadenfreude in The Mill on the Floss." At their most mundane, such convergences merely demonstrate the rich variety of contemporary criticism. At their most suggestive, they indicate how manipulative single-minded readings can be.

¹¹The single exception is his passing reference to the French author Senancour's romantic novel, Obermann. Whereas English fiction was beneath his notice, this work impressed Arnold so much so that he wrote two poems about it.

¹²The names are from The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Barnaby Rudge, and Our Mutual Friend, respectively. Arnold's essay first appeared in the National Review in the fall of 1864, and was reprinted in Essays in Criticism in 1865. Our Mutual Friend was serialized between May 1864 and November 1865.

¹³See Dickens1 Letters, III, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, (New York, 1965): 304.

¹⁴Broadly speaking, the postcolonial narrative of literary history follows the pattern of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The queer narrative of nineteenth-century fiction reads like an intensely theoretical Picture of Dorian Gray. I develop these analogies in later chapters.

¹⁵In this respect, On Scholarly Love is written in a spirit akin to that of James Kincaid's Annoying the Victorians (New York, 1995), whose irreverent readings of Victorian literature form a hilariously astute send-up of the field.

¹⁶The example here is that of William A. Cohen's chapter, "Manual Conduct in Great Expectations."

¹⁷Only the most brilliant readers can make this form work. See D.A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (Berkeley 1988) for an example of a style of close reading that has inspired an entire industry of admiring, and less successful, imitators.

¹⁸The rhetoric of scholarly love shows up everywhere. Some recent examples: Michael Berube's The Employment of English, which begins with the words, "I love literature. I really do," Elaine Marks' President's Column in the Fall 1993 MLA Newsletter, which describes "loving" literature as a "turn on," and the Presidential Forum of Profession 94, "Amo, Amas, Amat: `Literature,'" which features variously besotted declarations of scholarly love by such luminaries as Jonathan Culler and Biddy Martin.

¹⁹Nina Auerbach offers a different but entirely tantalizing explanation for the current dearth of good Eliot criticism in her review essay, "The Waning George Eliot," Victorian Literature and Culture (1997): 353-358.