This panel features papers by three early- and mid-career scholars who bring the tools of 20^th-century analytic philosophy to bear in order to consider aspects of Victorian literature that have not previously been well understood. The implication of these arguments branches in two significant directions. First, each contends that our view of the intellectual and literary culture of the British 19^th century can be clarified by taking up concepts derived from the analytic philosophy of language. They offer both new readings of literary texts (Ehrhardt) and new arguments about the way Victorians dealt with the problem of referentiality in a variety of contexts (Farina, Bartlett). Each looks beyond established models that scholars have used for understanding the referential function of literary language in the Victorian period and the ways Victorians themselves theorized language. Second, each of the papers builds from specific readings in the Victorian period to argue for a broadening of critical methodology in the present. In this way the papers provide test cases for a theoretical renovation in literary studies, one that looks to a strand of twentieth-century philosophy that literary critics had until recently avoided. Likewise, analytic philosophers in general have regarded literary language as beyond the scope of their studies. Yet as these papers suggest, the notion that literary language should be excepted from linguistic philosophy was a 20th-century invention. For the Victorians, literary fiction and philosophical investigations of language were intimately connected. The panel will conclude with a response from a scholar whose previous work on Victorian language theory drew on structuralist and poststructuralist theory (Bigelow), and his response advocates continuing conversation between these methods and the analytic theory highlighted by the presenters.

This panel builds on a growing body of work that explores the potential of linguistic philosophy to enrich our understanding of Victorian literature. It brings together two leading voices in this emerging conversation. Jami Bartlett’s influential Object Lessons: The Novel as Theory of Reference (Chicago 2016) identifies literary language as the site of important thinking about the function of linguistic reference. Jonathan Farina’s Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge 2017) looks at the particular way the language of the novel refers to characters. These books, along with Daniel Wright’s Bad Logic: Reasoning About Desire in the Victorian Novel (Hopkins 2018), and Elaine Freedgood’s Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel (Princeton 2019), have returned Victorianists to fundamental questions about how literary texts refer to the world, questions taken up now by other scholars including Rebecca Ehrhardt, a PhD candidate at USC.

Bartlett will open the panel, arguing that three pieces in the first number of the Fortnightly Review (edited by George Henry Lewes and published on May 15, 1865) present in concentrated form the first principles of the analytic philosophy of language. The style of logical analysis in these three articles clearly prefigures later works such as Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910-13) and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). What is surprising about the pieces in the Fortnightly, however, is that each in different ways argues that literary language functions as the ground and logical premise of all philosophical propositions. More specifically, they see the concrete object as referentially presented in fiction to be the final, not the first, stage in a decompositional analysis of a philosophical proposition. The point is directly relevant for contemporary critics interested in questions of realism, reference and materiality in the aftermath of Thing Theory, since these pieces in the Fortnightly show us how it is only through literary language that we come to refer to anything at all. They present a version of analytic philosophy that was not followed by later thinkers, and so its implications have been little considered either by philosophers or literary scholars. Bartlett focuses on two implications of this argument: first, referential predication in language serves as the site of all philosophical analysis; and second, if this is so, then literary realism is the only place where we can reliably see it displayed.

Next, Ehrhardt takes up Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) as a case study in how Victorian novelists used fictional characterization to explore philosophical questions about reference. Dickens’s last completed novel is obsessed with the mutability of character description and in particular – as the climactic reemergence of the presumed-dead John Harmon through the aliases Julius Handford and John Rokesmith suggests – the referentiality of names. By reading the novel in conversation with the philosophical arguments of Gottlob Frege and Saul Kripke, Ehrhardt explores the ways in which Our Mutual Friend manipulates various forms of reference and, in turn, how those linguistic constructions shape its characters. In contrast to a German philological tradition that argued for a natural relationship between language and human character, such as Max Müller’s 1861 lectures at the Royal Institution (which Dickens attended), Our Mutual Friend emerges as an experiment in the alienation of language from human character, turning on a crisis of characterological reference.

Finally, Farina argues for a Victorian pre-history of ordinary language philosophy, a movement whose origins are typically attributed to the late work of Wittgenstein. Well before Wittgenstein, Farina points out, several Victorian philologists asserted that philosophers erred by abstracting their own metaphysical meanings of words instead of accepting that meaning is determined by colloquial, everyday usage. Among the most interesting and least remembered of these philologists is Victoria, Lady Welby, whose publications include Grains of Sense (1897), a compendium of philosophical musings on language; two articles on signification in Mind; and Significs and Language (1911), which established the “significs” school of linguistics. Farina analyzes Welby’s prescient linguistic epistemology as the culminating expression of an ordinary language philosophy inscribed in the popular Victorian vernacular philology of Meredith, Eliot, Darwin, and Dickens.

To ensure sufficient time for discussion, this panel’s three papers will each be held to a 16-minute time limit, followed by a 10-minute response from Gordon Bigelow.