2026/03/01 by Olivia Lingyi Xu
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Legal and Social Philosophy #Literature: history, themes, analysis
paper · doi:10.1632/s0030812926101849
openalex publication_date 2026/03/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
For some time now, Victorian studies as a field has been engaged in a sustained project of self-critique, attending to histories of structural and epistemic violence embedded in the various constituencies of the self—from what and how we study to who we are. Beyond the field, such self-critique forms part of what David Kurnick calls “the burgeoning tradition of disciplinary self-scrutiny” (350). The efflorescence of self-scrutiny in Victorian studies is carefully delineated in the two essays by Emily Steinlight and Jacob Romanow, both of which offer a measured reassessment of the limits not only of such field-specific self-critique but also of self-critique as a metacritical genre.