The Author in Victorian Literary Culture

Explains the reversal between Romantic expressivism and Modernist formalism by analysing Victorian ideas of authorship

• Takes seriously overlooked Victorian critics’ ideas, showing that they were not simply rehashing the Romantics’ or indulging in reactionary moralising, but featured a distinctive blend (‘Victorian authorialism’) of Romantic poetics and scientific discourse as concerns the category of the author
• Provides the first full-scale articulation of the role of Victorian culture in bringing about the shift from expressivism to formalism, showing how clashes between Victorian writers and critics prepared the ground for the reaction against ‘Romanticism’ in Modernist critical theory
• Engages in detail with the dynamics whereby literature and criticism have influenced each other, demonstrating the continuity between high-brow poetics, middle-brow literary journalism and literary practice in the period, and bringing to light little-known sources
• Shows how British Aestheticism was instrumental in establishing the set of formalist ideas that became mainstream early in the following century by reconsidering major aestheticist writers such as Swinburne and Wilde and the significance of the squabbles around their works

This book traces the history of the idea of the author between the two key critical moments of Romantic expressivism and Modernist formalism. The former dominated anglophone criticism up to the 1830s, and placed authorial expression at the very centre of criticism; the latter became the standard after the First World War, and regarded the author as an undesirable distraction. The book shows that the shift was prepared in Victorian literary culture. Combining analyses of Victorian critical theories and practices with case studies centred on the critical reception of canonical writers such as A.C. Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, the book explores why and how ‘impersonality’ became the dominant aesthetic ideal in anglophone criticism.