Addresses the interface between literature and theory. This book examines a wide range of authors, from Dickens to Joyce, and engages directly with a number of major theorists - including Derrida, Miller, Bloom, Heidegger, Agamben. It takes the reader on a journey through the issues and ideas involved in reading literature, in theory.

Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction: Literature, in theory; PART I Subjectivities; 1. Toward a phenomenology of urban Gothic: the example of Dickens; 2. Eminent Victorians or 'true histories': Anne Bronte, Thomas Hood, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning; 3. The 'political' novel in the nineteenth century or, the contested ground of the present; 4. Professions: of English diaspora; 5. No, not, none, nothing, nobody: place, pattern, death and narratives of negation in Dubliners; PART II Responses & Responsibilities; 6. 'A self-referential density': Glyph, the fiction of transgression and the 'theory' thing; 7. Teaching Derrida?; 8. 'Theory' & the novel (& the novel?); 9. Of hospitality & the demands of criticism or, setting an example; PART III The work of the trope or, literature in theory; 10. The reiterable circularity of Being; 11. Responsibilities of J or, aphorism's other: criticism's powers of transformation; 12. 'The strong dead return': Harold Bloom's daemonic shades; 13. Heidegger's uncanny: the manifold technicity of the unhomely; 14. Face to face with Giorgio Agamben or, the other in love; Bibliography; Index.