ABSTRACT
The previous chapter describes the manner in which debates about historicism have affected our understanding of the relationship between nineteenth-century literary works and what can loosely be termed their historical contexts. In this chapter we discuss the influence of two other broad areas of theoretical enquiry, gender studies (which encompasses both feminism and queer theory) and postcolonial theory, on the ways in which the literary history of the nineteenth century has been understood. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a comprehensive survey of these theories, which have their own complex histories of development. It is not unusual, for example, for commentators to distinguish between ‘American’, ‘British’ and ‘French’ feminism, or between ‘first-’, ‘second-’ and ‘third’-wave feminism, and even to talk of a ‘post-feminist’ criticism. Likewise postcolonial theory embraces several different kinds of paradigms for understanding the relationship between self and other. As we noted in Chapter 2, the model of East-West relations proposed by Edward Said in his pioneering Orientalism has been contested and complicated by a range of subsequent theorists. The work of some critics, including Gayatri Spivak’s theorisation of the position of the subaltern, Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the ‘contact zone’, has focused on isolating those conditions in which colonised subjects are able to engage with, and so develop strategies of resistance to, the forms of representation that subjugate them (Spivak (1988); Bhabha (1994); Pratt (2009)). Other critics have suggested that there needs to be more sensitivity to the different kinds of political and cultural relations that obtained between Britain and ‘Eastern’ nations, such those with colonised India, on the one hand, and uncolonised Japan (with whom Britain none the less enjoyed a privileged trade relationship), on the other. Moreover, both gender and postcolonial theory intersect in complex ways in the investigation of the related topic of the formation of identity, and the proposition, perhaps most forcefully articulated by Judith Butler, that identity is constructed in relation to difference, but that the categories through which difference is articulated, whether of race, gender, class or nation, are fundamentally unstable. This occurs, she suggests, partly because
they have no reality outside culture, and partly because any act of binary differentiation – whether a distinction between self and other, or between centre and periphery – must necessarily incorporate that which is its opposite (Butler 1990).
