Written over a thirty-five year period, these essays reflect the changes in J. Hillis Miller s thinking on Victorian topics, from an early concern with questions of consciousness, form, and intellectual history, to a more recent focus on parable and the development of a deconstructive ethics of reading.
Miller defines the term Victorian subjects in more than one sense. The phrase identifies an historical time but also names a concern throughout with subjectivity, consciousness, and selfhood in Victorian literature. The essays show various Victorian subjectivities seeking to ground...

"Theory Now and Then" contains the more overtly theoretical essays by J. Hillis Miller published between 1966 and 1989. These essays trace the trajectory of theory over the last thirty years in the United States: from the Continental Shift announced in the Yale Colloquium of 1965, through Miller s assimilation of the work of the Geneva Critics, to the shift to that deconstruction in America in which Miller played a conspicuous role.
Included here are review essays on other theorists work: the Geneva Circle including Georges Poulet; Joseph Riddel, Edward Said, Meyer Abrams; and the critics...