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IT ALL BEGAN WITH Critical Practice, the 1980 New Accents volume that introduced Catherine Belsey to an international audience and laid out what were to become some of the signature features of her work: namely, a passionate embrace of theoretical inquiry, a strong antipathy to the moralizing and the empiricism that imbued one strand of twentieth-century British criticism, and an intellectual voraciousness that refused to be tethered to a particular genre or period.1 If this essay appears in Shakespeare Studies it is in part because Belsey has written extensively about early modern drama, and particularly about Shakespeare, but that has never been her sole interest. Her books discuss the poetry of John Donne and John Milton, the fiction of Conan Doyle, the romances of Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Chrétien de Troyes, and the plays of Bertold Brecht, among many others. Her critical range of reference is equally capacious; Aristotle, Sidney, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Machery, Leavis, Fish, Saussure-she has things to say about all of them, and does, in a voice at once judicious and, just occasionally, acerbic.
In this essay I will argue that the special value of Belsey's work arises from its enduring and energetic commitment to the insights of a particularly exciting moment in the development of Western literary theory, namely, the flourishing of poststructuralism in the late 1970s and 1980s. This period of intellectual ferment, contestation, and discovery has left its mark on all her work. I do not mean that Belsey's thinking has not changed over time; it has, in ways I will explore below. Nonetheless, postructuralist understandings of language and subjectivity form the bedrock of her critical practice, which I will unpack in what follows.
Beginnings
The Belsey of 1980 registers all the excitement members of her (and my] generation felt at being liberated by French theory from many of the common sense notions that had dominated AngloAmerican criticism in the preceding decades. In fact, influenced in particular by Roland Barthes's exposure in Mythologies of the way in which ideology works to naturalize interested ideas as selfobvious truths, Belsey made the critique of common sense a key part of her work.2 Familiar ideas, such as that of a universal human nature and of man as the...