VICTORIAN PARATEXTS

Abstract

IN THE POST-THEORETICAL (re)turn to history there is now, in literary and cultural studies, an increasing preoccupation with material relations, manifest in the growing number of interdisciplinary approaches foregrounding the importance of the production, circulation, and reception of texts. It has become increasingly evident that, despite internal claims for praxis, a much-vaunted cultural materialism has found itself at times imaginatively and practically restrained as a consequence of extreme textualist legacies. The familiar and too easy dichotomy between the so-called empiricism and the so-called critical theory is now beginning to recede as empiricist methodologies, much maligned in the post-humanist critiques of the 1980s, are beginning to make their presences felt again, though in revitalized and theoretically informed ways.