Conservative

Abstract

The conservative—as both a philosophy and a political ideology—was radically unstable in the Victorian period, and so too were its manifestations in the literary sphere. However, as one of the keynotes of Victorian politics, life, and literature, it raises some serious questions about the consequences for our scholarship that it remains relatively neglected and undertheorized. We should train ourselves to read for the conservative alongside the liberal, to see how conservative aesthetics shape writers and texts in myriad ways.