7 - Dickens in an Age of Theory I: New Theories, New Readings (1980–2000)

Summary

THE CHANGING TIDES IN LITERARY STUDY brought in a new wave of critics in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, and the agenda for Dickens studies was changed notably. New approaches to literature — deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, new psychological approaches to character and texts, and the rise of interdisciplinary studies of literary texts informed by new ideas of culture — signaled a sharp break from more conventional forms of criticism. While traditional biographical, historical, textual, formalist, and humanist studies continued to be published, such works competed for attention in the academic marketplace with those using new methodologies stressing the fluidity of texts, the “death of the author,” the “situatedness” and historicity of knowledge, and the power relationships that underlie even the most seemingly benign works of literature.

The reaction of The Dickens Industry to these new approaches was mixed. It should not be surprising that a number of the most thoughtful and influential books on Dickens written during the last two decades of the century would be shaped by one theory or another, especially since one of the leaders of this new form of literary study in America was J. Hillis Miller, whose 1958 book on Dickens continued to be cited with greater frequency than any other critical work on the novelist. Nevertheless, there remained among the ranks of Dickens scholars (perhaps much more so than among those interested in other figures) a core of die-hard traditionalists who continued to read and write about Dickens as if Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, the Russian formalists, the new historians, or even the feminists had never existed.