ions, from terrorism, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, and instability, to moderation, freedom, stability, and strategic alliances, all of them as unclear as they are both potent and unrefined in their appeal. It is next to impossible to think about human society either in a global way (as Richard Falk eloquently does in A Global Approach to National Policy [1975]) or at the level of everyday life. As Philip Green shows in The Pursuit of Inequality, notions like equality and welfare have simply been chased off the intellectual landscape. Instead a brutal Darwinian picture of self-help and self-promotion is proposed by Reaganism, both domestically and internationally, as an image of the world ruled by what is being called “productivity” or “free enterprise.” Add to this the fact that liberalism and the Left are in a state of intellectual disarray and fairly dismal perspectives emerge. The challenge posed by these perspectives is not how to cultivate one’s garden despite them but how to understand cultural work occurring within them. What I propose here, then, is a rudimentary attempt to do just that, notwithstanding a good deal of inevitable incompleteness, overstatement, generalization, and crude characterization. Finally, I will very quickly propose an alternative way of undertaking cultural work, although anything like a fully worked-out program can only be done collectively and in a separate study. My use of “constituency,” “audience,” “opponents,” and “community” serves as a reminder that no one writes simply for oneself. There is always an Other; and this Other willy-nilly turns interpretation into a social activity, albeit with unforeseen consequences, audiences, constituencies, and so on. And, I would add, interpretation is the work of intellectuals, a class badly in need today of moral rehabilitation and social redefinition. The one issue that urgently requires study is, for the humanist no less than for the social scientist, the status of information as a component of knowledge: its sociopolitical status, its contemporary fate, its economy (a subject treated recently by Herbert Schiller in Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500). We all think we know what it means, for example, to have information and to write and interpret texts containing information. Yet we live in an age which places unprecedented emphasis on the production of knowledge and information, as Fritz Machlup’s Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States dramatizes clearly. What happens to information and knowledge, then, when IBM and AT&T—two of the world’s largest corporations—claim that what they do is to put “knowledge” to work “for the people”? What is the role of humanistic knowledge and information if they are not to be unknowing (many ironies there) partners in commodity production and marketing, so much so that what humanists do may in the end turn out to be a quasi-religious concealment of this peculiarly unhumanistic process? A true secular politics of interpretation sidesteps this question at its peril. At a recent MLA convention, I stopped by the exhibit of a major university press and remarked to the amiable sales representative on duty that there seemed to be no limit to the number of highly specialized books of advanced literary criticism his press put out. “Who reads these books?” I asked, implying, of course, that however brilliant and important most of them were they were difficult to read and therefore could not have a wide audience—or at least an audience wide enough to justify regular publication during a time of economic crisis. The answer I received made sense, assuming I was told the truth. People who write specialized, advanced (i.e., New New) criticism faithfully read one another’s books. Thus each such book could be assured of, but wasn’t necessarily always getting, sales of around three thousand copies, “all other things being equal.” The last qualification struck me as ambiguous at best, but it needn’t detain us here. The point was that a nice little audience had been built and could be routinely mined by this press; certainly, on a much larger scale, publishers of cookbooks and exercise manuals apply a related principle as they churn out what may seem like a very long series of unnecessary books, even if an expanding crowd of avid food and exercise aficionados is not quite the same thing as a steadily attentive and earnest crowd of three thousand critics reading one another. What I find peculiarly interesting about the real or mythical three thousand is that whether they derive ultimately from the Anglo-American New Criticism (as formulated by I. A. Richards, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and company, beginning in the 1920s and continuing for several decades thereafter) or from the so-called New New Criticism (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al., during the 1960s), they vindicate, rather than undermine, the notion that intellectual labor ought to be divided into progressively narrower niches. Consider very quickly the irony of this. New Criticism claimed to view the verbal object as in itself it really was, free from the distractions of biography, social message, even paraphrase. Matthew Arnold’s critical program was thereby to be advanced not by jumping directly from the text to the whole of culture but by using a highly concentrated verbal analysis to comprehend cultural values available only through a finely wrought literary structure finely understood. Charges made against the American New Criticism that its ethos was clubby, gentlemanly, or Episcopalian are, I think, correct only if it is added that in practice New Criticism, for all its elitism, was strangely populist in intention. The idea behind the pedagogy, and of course the preaching, of Brooks and Robert Penn Warren was that everyone properly instructed could feel, perhaps even act, like an educated gentleman. In its sheer projection this was by no means a trivial ambition. No amount of snide mocking at their quaint gentility can conceal the fact that, in order to accomplish the conversion, the New Critics aimed at nothing less than the removal of all of what they considered the specialized rubbish—put there, they presumed, by professors of literature—standing between the reader of a poem and the poem. Leaving aside the questionable value of the New Criticism’s ultimate social and moral message, we must concede that the school deliberately and perhaps incongruously tried to create a wide community of responsive readers out of a very large, potentially unlimited, constituency of students and teachers of literature. In its early days, the French nouvelle critique, with Barthes as its chief apologist, attempted the same kind of thing. Once again the guild of professional literary scholars was characterized as impeding responsiveness to literature. Once again the antidote was what seemed to be a specialized reading technique based on a near jargon of linguistic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist terms, all of which proposed a new freedom for writers and literate readers alike. The philosophy of écriture promised wider horizons and a less restricted community, once an initial (and as it turned out painless) surrender to structuralist activity had been made. For despite structuralist prose, there was no impulse among the principal structuralists to exclude readers; quite the contrary, as Barthes’ often abusive attacks on Raymond Picard show, the main purpose of critical reading was to create new readers of the classics who might otherwise have been frightened off by their lack of professional literary accreditation. For about four decades, then, in both France and the United States, the schools of “new” critics were committed to prying literature and writing loose from confining institutions. However much it was to depend upon carefully learned technical skills, reading was in very large measure to become an act of public depossession. Texts were to be unlocked or decoded, then handed on to anyone who was interested. The resources of symbolic language were placed at the disposal of readers who it was assumed suffered the debilitations of either irrelevant “professional” information or the accumulated habits of lazy inattention. Thus French and American New Criticism were, I believe, competitors for authority within mass culture, not other-worldly alternatives to it. Because of what became of them, we have tended to forget the original missionary aims the two schools set for themselves. They belong to precisely the same moment that produced Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas about an engaged literature and a committed writer. Literature was about the world, readers were in the world; the question was not whether to be but how to be, and this was best answered by carefully analyzing language’s symbolic enactments of the various existential possibilities available to human beings. What the FrancoAmerican critics shared was the notion that verbal discipline could be selfsufficient once you learned to think pertinently about language stripped of unnecessary scaffolding: in other words, you did not need to be a professor to benefit from Donne’s metaphors or Saussure’s liberating distinction between langue and parole. And so the New Criticism’s precious and cliquish aspect was mitigated by its radically anti-institutional bias, which manifested itself in the enthusiastic therapeutic optimism to be observed in both France and the United States. Join humankind against the schools: this was a message a great many people could appreciate. How strangely perverse, then, that the legacy of both types of New Criticism is the private-clique consciousness embodied in a kind of critical writing that has virtually abandoned any attempt at reaching a large, if not a mass, audience. My belief is that both in the United States and in France the tendency toward formalism in New Criticism was accentuated by the academy

Reflections on Exile

Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how 'Englishness' was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of 'native' metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siecle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration. Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.

At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain

Interpreting and applying the concept of sustainable development is increasingly viewed as being the way to promulgate just and practicable economic, environmental and social policy. It is thus important that there be increased public and political awareness concerning the origins of economic theory, and its early relationship to sustainability concepts. While the term 'sustainable development' was popularised by the World Commission on Environment and Development report Our Common Future in 1987, it is generally recognised that notions of sustainability were promoted in `limits to growth' and 'green' discourses in the early 1970s (Meadows et al.: 1974, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome, Potomac Associates and Pan Books, London and Sydney). However, there is little acknowledgement of the way in which nineteenth century intellectuals, from a range of disciplines, conceptualised the importance of balancing economic, social and environmental sustainability in their quest for justice and the conservation of nature. There was a considerable exchange of ideas on `political economy' and nature across Europe, and later the Americas, from the middle of the eighteenth century. This discourse reached its intellectual peak in the nineteenth century. During that era there was a proliferation of literature that was aimed at improving the human condition and recognising humanity's dependence upon nature. In Europe and the USA the participants in the debate included Cantillon, Quesnay, Condorcet, Galiani, Von Hayek, Marx and George. Due to the breadth of this influential body of work, we focus here on the British Victorian thinkers such as Darwin, Malthus, Martineau and Mill. These thinkers influenced each other in developing their theories and ideas in science, politics, economics and philosophy, and were influenced in turn by an earlier generation of intellectuals, such as Adam Smith. For the Victorian thinkers, conserving nature while trying to improve the distribution of wealth was a not a paradox, but a moral duty, and for them Smith's `rational' pursuit of self-interest could only be followed if it did not interfere with 'the rules of justice'. We argue that the manner in which these thinkers conceptualised their theories and ideas represents the nineteenth century origins of sustainability concepts.

Some of the Nineteenth Century Origins of the Sustainability Concept

ince the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social formations. From Georg Lukaics to Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms do not reflect economic arrangements in any simple way in this critical tradition. In The Political Unconscious (1981) -perhaps the most sustained articulation of a Marxist incorporation of formalist concerns-Jameson defines an attention to the ideology of form as an effort to grasp the "symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production" (76). Traces or anticipations: for Jameson, the form of the literary artifact is by no means simply an aftereffect of the "real"; it may itself promise or predict a new reality. Urging us to move beyond political readings that focus on a text's content-its representation of class relations, for example -Jameson argues that the "historical or ideological subtext ... is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality," but "rather must itself always be (re) constructed after the fact" (81). Thus it is literary forms, read in their rich complexity as struggles among conflicting sign systems, that bear witness to a dialectical social agon, offering us our best access to both existent and emergent systems of social relations. Foucauldian and New Historicist critics, too, have argued that literary forms do not merely reflect social relationships but may help bring them into being. Powerfully influential accounts of the

Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies

Dubbed 'Darwin's Bulldog' for his combative role in the Victorian controversies over evolutionary theory, Thomas Huxley has been widely regarded as the epitome of the professional scientist who emerged in the nineteenth century from the restrictions of ecclesiastical authority and aristocratic patronage. Yet from the 1850s until his death in 1895, Huxley always defined himself as a 'man of science', a moral and religious figure, not a scientist. Exploring his relationships with his wife, fellow naturalists, clergymen and men of letters, White presents a new analysis of the authority of science, literature, and religion during the Victorian period, showing how these different practices were woven into a fabric of high culture, and integrated into institutions of print, education and research. He provides a substantially different view of Huxley's role in the evolution debates, and of his relations with his scientific contemporaries, especially Richard Owen and Charles Darwin.

Thomas Huxley: Making the 'Man of Science'

Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing

The Columbia history of the British novel

Examines the works of three Victorian writers, looks at the ways they subverted and affirmed their society, and discusses women's higher education in nineteenth century England.

Deirdre David

Papers

Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing

The Columbia history of the British novel

Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot

Intellectual women and Victorian patriarchy

Fictions of resolution in three Victorian novels : North and South, Our mutual friend, Daniel Deronda