The Fictional Theories of J. Hillis Miller: Humanism, Phenomenology, and Deconstruction in The Form of Victorian Fiction and Fiction and Repetition

Abstract

With the publication of Fiction and Repetition, J. Hillis Miller has confirmed his place in the first ranks of American critics. His importance is not merely that he proposed the most important sustained argument for a way of reading fiction by one of the American post-structuralists, but that he entered into a serious dialogue with past criticism of fiction. Cumulatively, J. Hillis Miller’s six critical books — Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958), The Disappearance of God (1963), Poets of Reality (1965), The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968), Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970), and Fiction and Repetition (1982)—constitute one of the major critical achievements of the last two decades. These are primarily works of literary criticism, but they are also substantial methodological and theoretical statements. In my final chapter, I have chosen to focus on two of Hillis Miller’s books, The Form of Victorian Fiction and Fiction and Repetition, because they are less concerned with specific authors and texts and more with theoretical and methodological questions about fiction.