Carlyle's techniques in "Sartor Resartus"

Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame

[Home —> Authors —> Thomas Carlyle —> Works —> Carlyle and the Search for Authority]

[Chapter 3, note 15, of the author's Carlyle and the Search for Authority, which the Ohio State University Press published in 1991. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright. indicates a link to material not in the original print version. GPL]

These techniques are described in Cabau, 140; Caserio, 31-32; Edwards, 99; Gilbert, 433-36; Leicester, 11, 15; M. Roberts, 404; and Haney, 31 9ff. This is not to deny that Sartor Resartus draws on a long tradition of rellgious and literary symbolism and figuration, but it can be argued that even the extravagance of Sartor's allusions to biblical, classical, and German texts, as well as contemporary thought and events, does not provide any real external reference (i.e., to a tradition that precedes and grounds the text), since it makes use of them apart from the system of meanings to which they were formerly attached. Along these lines, Linda Peterson has recently argued that Carlyle employs a Strausslan hermeneutics of intertextuality that finds meaning through the relation between texts rather than, as in traditional theories of revelation, through appeal to the single divine author (54-57).

Contents last modified 5 October 2001