BOOK REVIEW: edited by Suzy Anger.KNOWING THE PAST: VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Abstract

It appears that "reality" is staging some kind of comeback as scholars rethink the skeptical routines of thought that defined structuralist and poststructuralist criticisms. In the [End Page 170] heyday of high theory, discourses of reference and objectivity took a back seat to examinations of "signifying systems," understood as linguistic and social structures that savvy critics could expose as arbitrary. But the last several years have brought diverse signs of change. A cadre of literary scholars is examining brain science, systems theory, and evolutionary psychology to rethink literary responsiveness as a cognitive adaptation (for example, Mark Turner's The Literary Mind [1996]). A revitalized version of identity politics has dubbed itself "postpositivist realism" to assert the reality of minority identity while staying clear of unreconstructed essentialism (Reclaiming Identity [2000], edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia). Still other scholars have argued that a routinized postmodernist epistemological skepticism has dangerously eroded the institutional and cultural legitimacy of literary study by sustaining, in effect, an atmosphere of knee-jerk antirealism (John Guillory, "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism," Critical Inquiry 28 [Winter 2002]: 470-508). As a Victorianist instance in this trend toward questions of objectivity and historical knowledge, Suzy Anger's essay collection Knowing the Past belongs in company with several recent single-authored books in our field, including Amanda Anderson's reading of detachment and cosmopolitanism in Powers of Distance (2001) and George Levine's revisionary account of disinterested knowledge in Dying to Know (2002).