UC Irvine

“Still Hidden in the Future” takes a pragmatist approach to reading the mutual interference of allegory and metalepsis in British fiction in the long nineteenth century. I begin the study by providing a threefold account of metalepsis derived from narratology, traditional rhetoric, and the work of Harold Bloom. In each instance, the trope serves to disrupt priority, and reading texts marked by metaleptic effects often requires entertaining nonstandard and occasionally counterlogical interpretive premises. With that in mind, the dissertation offers a metacritical argument that prescriptive reading methodologies foreclose potentially illuminating critical maneuvers and, for that reason, should be ignored. Paul Feyerabend’s critique of the scientific method serves as theoretical grounding for this aspect of the argument. The first chapter elaborates a model for reading based on the practice of modeling developed in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” The pragmatist approach I develop in the chapter serves as a model for my work in later chapters, and my reading of metalepsis in Carroll’s fable of right-thinking feeds back into my larger polemic against received method. The second chapter makes a more radical argument about an intra-oeuvre metalepsis in G.K. Chesteron’s corpus. Investigating the meaning of a series of cryptic notes in The Man Who Was Thursday leads me not only to a metaleptic intensification of Thursday’s themes in the much later Tales of the Long Bow but also to a metaleptically embedded justification of my own badly premised search in one note’s allusion to a similar effort in W.S. Gilbert’s Bab Ballads. The final chapter amounts to a symptomatic reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, arguing that the author’s use of a banshee figure appropriated from Ann Fanshawe’s memoirs reveals the novel as an attempt to rewrite the suffering of Irish people during the Great Hunger as a text about personal, apolitical mourning. In each of the chapters, I deliberately incorporate elements of earlier, abortive interpretive efforts to emphasize the pragmatist commitments of my approach.