ABSTRACT
Chapters 4 through 8 present a series of readings in practical criticism that illustrate these contentions and bear them out. To show how thoroughgoing the results of theory’s effects have been, I will search out the metaphor of language in a series of literary texts from the Victorian novel to modern fiction and poetry to show how they share a common project from a contemporary point of view. The way the metaphor of language is employed in literature banishes the distinction between form and content. When the world itself is represented as a patchwork of languages, it becomes a mirror of the art that represents it rather than, as Oscar Wilde famously reminded us, the other way around. I begin in Chapter 4 with Victorian fiction, spurred by J. Hillis Miller’s example, to show how texts are about texts by virtue of their representationalism, not despite it. The world—in Dickens, in Trollope, in George Eliot—is a world of language, concrete, material language and signage, from what we think and feel to the products we consume and the means of production that make them.
