James Eli Adams
Victorian Interpretation is a wonderfully bold, erudite, and bracing rethinking of Victorian intellectual method. In charting the emergence of a general hermeneutics in nineteenth-century Britain, Suzy Anger offers pointed revaluations of major Victorian thinkers and Victorian thought generally, and deftly underscores their relevance to the way we interpret now. This is a book that should engage historians and theorists alike.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Suzy Anger has written an astute, deeply informed history of Victorian theories of interpretation. As she thinks her way into the sophisticated balances struck by Victorian minds, Anger's own narrative exemplifies the double embrace of epistemological doubt and ethical commitment that she traces through the nineteenth century.
George Levine
"Suzy Anger's book on Victorian hermeneutics will significantly reshape our understanding of the critical tradition that has formed the discipline of literary study. Anger's critical and scholarly virtues are multiple, and they work to illuminate both philosophical issues and the development of literary criticism through the nineteenth century into modernism. The book taught me an enormous amount about hermeneutics and, even more important for literary scholars, the way the hermeneutic tradition entered into and helped shape and anticipate modern criticism. Anger is one of those rare literary critics who has truly mastered philosophical issues and who can speak authoritatively across the disciplines. She has helped change the shape of the field."
Gerhard Joseph
Suzy Anger moves between biblical and secular, German and British, Victorian and twentieth-century theories of interpretation with great tact, eloquence, and originality. Exploring both the continuities and the swervings within such pairs, she isolates a distinctively British hermeneutic tradition in the links among Carlyle, Newman, George Eliot, and Wilde with a persuasive force that immediately establishes her as a literary/philosophical critic of the highest order.