Introduction: A Moment, Recalled

Abstract

The moment or encounter out of which this collection of essays has arisen as the coming forth of a certain community was, as is usually the case with such heterogeneous collections, a conference. The conference was entitled, with all the ambiguity that could be mustered, ‘Victorian Literature, Contemporary Theory’, and took place, that is to say took place ‘initially’ and repeatedly, both at the time, during the time, of the event and, again, here, in another fashion, in different voices, during a weekend in July at the University of Luton in 1994. This is what is being recalled. Even at this point of recollection the title of the conference still retains its ambiguity, the four terms of the title holding together in uneasy, yet convivial, conference, as moments in overheard discourses, coming together, as if it were by chance or, as it turned out at the time, good fortune. Strangers at a party, with no one knowing who the host was. Whatever relationship is mapped between the terms ‘Victorian’, ‘Literature’, ‘Contemporary’, ‘Theory’ is kept at a remove from immediate comprehension; and this is, perhaps, best; for this illustrates, for the moment, that the field of Victorian literary studies is a diverse field, with no one theory mastering, appropriating, policing or dominating the proceedings. Nothing is reified, and all remains delightfully ‘improper’ — or even, on occasion, scandalous, to use a favoured word of one of the two keynote speakers, James R. Kincaid — in the interpretation of texts and the uses of ‘theory’.