What does it mean to write the life and times of a major writer in the era of poststructuralist literary theory? What it doesn't mean, of course, is to contrast the current situation with some pretheoretical paradise in which the exercise would have been unproblematic. The fact is that the study of literature is by definition theoretical; it is simply that the terms of the debate differ between then and now. An example of how one method challenges another can be seen by glancing at the impact of new, or practical criticism, on two of the favorite kinds of Dickens studies from earlier in the century. Prototype studies attempted to identify the “real” human beings behind Dickens’s characters, while topographical studies sought to identify the “real” places which formed the inspiration for the settings of Dickens’s novels. New criticism, which flourished as a movement in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to remove literary texts from the historical arena through a concentration on their structure and language, and so was committed to a rejection of this implied equation of art and reality. This approach was superseded by new kinds of theory which problematized, among other matters, the existence of an external reality without the experience of the observer as subject and suggested that the author was now dead, as a challenge to the traditional role of the artist as creator of fictional worlds which mirrored both external reality and the writer’s personal life. But whatever the differences between new criticism and poststructuralist literary theory, they do have one thing in common in their stress on the primacy of language. Contemporary theory has, of course, taken this position further by way of the concept of textuality, the notion that the individual and the world, as well as the literary artifact, are written; that is, are inscriptions of those ideological formations which are the distinguishing features of major historical epochs.