Victorian Subjects - Hardcover

Miller, J. Hillis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822311100 ISBN 13: 9780822311102

Publisher: Duke University Press, 1990

Synopsis

Written over a thirty-five year period, these essays reflect the changes in J. Hillis Miller’s thinking on Victorian topics, from an early concern with questions of consciousness, form, and intellectual history, to a more recent focus on parable and the development of a deconstructive ethics of reading.
Miller defines the term “Victorian subjects” in more than one sense. The phrase identifies an historical time but also names a concern throughout with subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood in Victorian literature. The essays show various Victorian subjectivities seeking to ground themselves in their own underlying substance or in some self beneath or beyond the self. But “Victorian subjects” also discusses those who were subject to Queen Victoria, to the reigning ideologies of the time, to historical, social, and material conditions, including the conditions under which literature was written, published, distributed, and consumed.
These essays, taken together, sketch the outlines of ideological assumptions within the period about the self, interpersonal relations, nature, literary form, the social function of literature, and other Victorian subjects.

About this title

About the Author

J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books and articles on literature and literary theory, most recently "For Derrida".

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822311100
• ISBN 13: 9780822311102
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336