Ethical excess: Stylizing difference in Victorian critical prose from Carlyle to Wilde

"Ethical Excess: Stylizing Difference in Victorian Critical Prose from Carlyle to Wilde," revives a critical discourse about style and ethics in nineteenth-century British letters, while participating in recent debates about identity politics and the competing functions of aesthetic criticism. Rather than working with the assumption that ethical articulations in criticism are built upon ascetic and "impersonal" styles, this project shows how the ethical appeal in Victorian prose relies on a superabundance of style and "personality" to promote an idiosyncratic and exceptional mode of ethical living. The techne of critique for Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde---their use of accents, querulous footnotes, synaesthetic passages and bathetic appeals---becomes the analogue for an eccentric, yet ethically oriented techne of living.Through readings of Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, and Wilde's De Profundis, "Ethical Excess" argues that the Victorian investment in the stylistically incomparable figure---the hero for Carlyle, the alien for Arnold, the artist for Pater, and Wilde for Wilde---does not inevitably lead to an outcome of coercion and cultural domination, or decadence and decay. Instead these authors' critical performances bear the seed for contemporary "representative" criticisms in the academy, particularly postcolonial and queer studies. Approaching ethics as form in the remaindered accents and disrupted rhythms theorized and performed in Victorian critical prose, "Ethical Excess" acknowledges the radical potential of aesthetic exemplarity, especially when mobilized in potent articulations of national and sexual difference. Yet "Ethical Excess" also urges that we remain vigilant about the formal and philosophical fetishization of otherness that lurks in the heart of representative criticism from the margins as well as the center.