Victorians in Theory:FromDerridatoBrowning. ByJOHN SCHAD. Manchester and New York:ManchesterUniversityPress. I999. x + 80 pp. ?4o. John Schad's title raises hopes: of the tracing of continuities between Theory and those predecessorswhom it affectsto overthrow,and thereforeof some unravelling of thatcumbrousbut strangelypersistentterm 'Victorian'.His book goes partof the way towards fulfilling them. It does not hazard an over-arching argument, but contains a seriesof essays, each of which twins a mid-nineteenth-centurypoet with a mid- to late-twentieth-century theorist, Hopkins with Lacan, Browning with Derrida, and so on, and proposes multiple connections between them. The meditation on Arnold and Foucaultwanders from the sea to the self to names to questions to laughter to sexuality to silence to reading and so on: other chapters adopt a similarlyrelaxedand expansiveline. On occasion, the method works well. The contention that in the poems of ChristinaRossetti (Irigaray-like)'it is often as if she is quoting ratherthanwriting'is apt, and Schad is good at spotting and pursuing inter-textual and intra-textual traces. He notices that 'AFight over the Body of Homer' is a poem about a poem about a fight over the body of Helen and points out that its 'account of TheIliad [.. .] is so intensely male -so hom(m)eric, as it were -that Helen is buried, overlooked'. Following up the matter of looks, he lights upon and puzzles over a moment in the poem 'Death', where the word 'ye', in the line 'Itis not deathye see', both looks back to 'eyes' which are mentioned earlier in the poem and strangely part-reflectsthe eye of the reader. Such acute and intrepid readings are welcome. Too often, though, they are licensed by partialquotation or neglect of textual surroundings.Schad runsfull tilt afterJan Marsh's speculations about paternal incest in the Rossetti family. 'Is this the guilt of incest?'he asksof 'The Convent Threshold'; a suggestionwhich would appear ratherless compelling if he quoted the full two lines at issue:'There'sblood between us, love, my love, IThere's father'sblood, there'sbrother'sblood', instead of guillotining the verse before it can mention the (presumablydead or wounded) sibling.Similarly,he createsan 'anonymoushomoerotic encounter'in the following lines from Arnold's 'The Buried Life' by introducing a full-stop after 'met' and breakingthe quotation there: I knew the massof men concealed Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed They would with othermen be met With blankindifference. One might as well just pick out 'I knew men' and have done with it. This creative attitude towards textual integrity is at one with the belief, everywhere implicit in the book's critical procedures, that 'reading' is not distinguishable from 'misreading'. One damaging consequence of such a practice is that Schad's central claim, which is that he uses not only 'the theory to reread the poetry' but also 'the poetry to reread the theory' must collapse. Like all other kinds of language use, poetry has an identity, and has meaning, only within relevant contexts, textual, historical, generic, and so on. Yet attention to such constraining circumstances in Victoriansin Theoryis shockingly cavalier. On p. 161 AuroraLeighis said to have been composed 'eight years after The OriginofSpecies'.In effect, the only context adduced in the book is what happens to occur to its author, and the nineteenth-century poems therefore turn into mirrors of his late-twentieth-century, broadly poststructuralist thoughts. Browning can offer no resistance to Derrida because he has already been understood in Derridean terms (for example, StJohn's Reviews 276 YES,31, 200I YES,31, 200I phrase 'my book speakson', in A Death in the Desert', is said to mean the same as 'theText cannot stop'). This failing vitiates the conclusions of even the more promising chapters. Christina Rossetti's famous line, here misquoted as 'I half turn to go yet turning stay', is presented as a challenge to 'philosophy's "solar tropism"' because in anotherpoem Rossetti once mentions a heliotrope, and despitethe factthat the sun, light, and so on nowhere appear in 'Remember'. More than this, since 'turningis the trope for trope (tropos meaning 'turn'); in both turning and yet not turning Rossetti turns against tropism itself'. There are no grounds at all for assenting...