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THE PARTY WAS SIGNALED BY A HUGE BANNER IN THE FOYER, "WHITHER Victorian Poetry?," and by that unmistakable roar of excited conversation--loud, confident, sophisticated, clever. Such a party roar is intimidating to the latecomer. I had a moment of apprehension. What exactly was I doing here? True, I, with a group of colleagues, was meant to draw some conclusions from these conversations. But that did not make me a participant. Was I a kind of oedipal eavesdropper? (Fretfully I realized that a person might be both a latecomer and a precursor figure, the worst of both worlds.) However, I pulled myself together and decided to listen for a while, and then to circulate among those clusters of eager talkers and ask them a few questions. (1) When I entered a wonderful sight met my eyes. Everyone was talking. There was dancing, and some people had come in fancy dress. The Multi-Dimensional Hypertext Line Dance was under way, where people created ever-changing pathways within the group with their bodies. Quite near and sometimes overlapping with it was the Intertextual Network Reel. The principle of this dance was that unless you touched at least two people simultaneously wherever you moved you were forced to drop out. Someone dressed as a satin-lined coffin containing the corpse of the Lyric "I" bumped into me. A beautiful screen-printed costume, covered in upraised pairs of hands signalling inverted commas with each of two fingers, presented itself as "Citation." A [pounds sterling]&$ sign floated past, "The Market." Just then some stately Neoformalists began an orderly patterned figure. Adjusting to the noise I began to distinguish fragments of words, then groups of words, then whole sentences. The prefix "re-" was frequent--reshaping, revising, reiterating, renewing, reinvigorating, revisiting, recovering, recuperating, redefining, reframing. This, given the remit of the question, "Whither Victorian Poetry?" was inevitable but interesting. The future starts with the past, with the doubling and folding back of re-tracing, where erasing becomes a tracing. (Helen Groth was heard quoting Benjamin's subtle remark that the future subsists by looking back.) Every new generation has to remake the terms of its criticism. And "new," of course, featured strongly. New taxonomies, new methodologies, new genealogies, new relationships, new aesthetics, new formalism: all these "news" asked for a fundamental act of restructuring. A series of recurrent words sounded insistently: challenge, expand, intertextual, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, performative, citation, mimicry, parodic, "author function," genre, inter-generic, trans-generic, sub-genres, gender, homoerotic, cultural studies, ideology, marginalized, the market, online database, hypertext, computer technology, networks, the canon, institutionalized. So many of these key words suggest spatial disposition across a surface. The persistent cognitive paradigm is that of the "trans," the crossing. A sentence emerges from the noise, "We postmodern Victorianists" (Andrew Stauffer). Yes, that's it. Another proclaims a liberating postmodern openness that I was delighted by: " I have ... taken dismay at an apprehension of banality ... as an invitation to read more carefully, not to stop" (Lee O'Brien). The consequence of all this is a willingness to read way beyond disciplinary boundaries. How much all these people know. The research breadth is awesome, the documentation frequently breathtaking. As I circled round the groups I was constantly scribbling references at the back of my filofax. I learned an unexpected consequence of this paradoxical combination of openness and professionalism. All these scholars are street-wise about the institutionalization of the subject, the constructedness of the field, and the vagaries of cultural capital. They have read their Bourdieu and John Guillory--and most have experienced the American tenure system. This makes them wary, wary of the successive theory waves that have passed over the subject feminism, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies. …

ion, they are empty of meaning. And this emptiness allows the poem to manipulate ideological conformism to reactionary values. Another of Tennyson's tactics is to pose an uninterpretable allegoricity, a saying otherwise that ducks reference. This way the text can occlude the contradictions of the dominant discourses it wants its readers to accept (for example, the contradictions between Christianity and capital) and enable its audience to write into its terms whatever conservative ideological positions it is invited to construct-whether religious, monarchical, imperialist, antifeminist. I wonder if Harrison's conviction that dominant discourses are monolithic and stable leads him to surrender too readily to the conservative elements in the text. At times, despite his understanding of ideology in process, his methodology forces him to posit a wholly unfractured or prefabricated conservative dominant in order to prove his poets' consent to or dissent from it. Certainly Arthur's daunting list of round table obligations--"To reverence the king [ . .] To break the heathen [...] To love one maiden only [...] teach high thought [...] And love of truth" (465-80) -is crushingly authoritarian and imperialist in spirit. What are the implications of reading differently? Interestingly, Graham's Ideologies of Epic takes up some of the passages Harrison discusses-including Tennyson's disavowal of his intention to write epic in the Idylls-but interprets them rather differently. Graham's understanding of ideology and discourse to some extent converges with that of Harrison, but his Bakhtinian model more emphatically refuses the monolithic status of discourse. He adroitly adapts Bakhtinian paradigms, arguing, as Bakhtin did, that the only context in which monologism is possible as an aspiration is the epic. Three elements of epic preserve a single discourse: the unity of a

I WOULD RATHER not think of Victorian studies and cultural studies in antithesis because both terms are misleading and obstruct research. We should not be choosing between either, but trying to think of a way of working that dissolves this antithesis. The first point I would like to make is that Victorian studies came into being as an interdisciplinary project just after the second world war — the journal of that name started up in the fifties. So, paradoxically, Victorian studies emerged conceptually after modernism was over and the study of modernism was well under way. I think that one of the reasons why Victorian studies appeared post-war was slightly suspect — the seeming comfort of a period not torn by the anguish of war (wrong — there were colonial wars going on all the time, they just were forgotten). A little while ago I looked to see if Victorian Studies contained any kind of statement about its project when it began. The first issue of Victorian Studies in September 1957 contained a cautious statement about its project, describing the Victorian “era” in terms of “events and personalities” and speaking of the “coordination” of disciplines rather than their transformation (3). This was innovative for its time, but imposed conceptual limits on research. If one looks back at the early issues, they are impressively scholarly and seem to be doing bits of history so-called official historians do not do.

The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lectures were established in 1985 following a donation from Mr Mohamed Aslam in memory of his wife, Dr Hilda Hulme. The lectures are on the subject of English literature and relate to one of ‘the three fields in which Dr Hulme specialised, namely Shakespeare, language in Elizabethan drama, and the nineteenth-century novel’.