Abstract
In 1866 the newly founded Société Linguistique de Paris formally excluded from its activities any consideration of the origins of language. This is one of many gestures during this period which mark the movement beyond Enlightenment conjecture and nineteenth-century philology to Saussurean linguistics, and thence to structuralism and poststructuralism, deep structures, and grammatology. In this paper I will reverse and simplify this sequence, and will begin by restating some of the principal contentions currently associated with the school of theory and criticism known as Deconstruction. I will then proceed to examine some of the analogues and antecedents of these contentions in mid-Victorian England, especially in the works of Swinburne, before concluding with a reassessment of the enduring importance of Swinburne for lovers of poetry and critical theory, and of the coherence and utility of Deconstruction itself.
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