Some thoughts that do not amount to a manifesto
(See here.)
1. In 1996, Robert Griffin published Wordsworth's Pope, which analyzed the relationship between Wordsworth's theoretical manifestos against neo-classical poetics (as embodied by Alexander Pope) and his own practice. Griffin suggests that while Wordsworth certainly throws down all available gauntlets against Pope, his actual work engages with, and frequently resorts to, the same neo-classical poetic forms, tropes, diction, &c. as his predecessor. The poets are different, to be sure, and Wordsworth is hardly imitating Pope--but he's also a lot less different than he wants the reader to think. This monograph came to mind.
2. When I was in graduate school, Romanticists deconstructed and New Historicized; early modernists New Historicized; eighteenth-century scholars "old" historicized, but also did a lot of formalism/genre theory; and medievalists still had a whole lot of philology going on. Victorianists, far from having no theory, tended to have strong affections for Foucault, gender theory, and the burgeoning fields of postcolonial and queer theory. Nevertheless, it's true that Victorian studies were never associated so clearly with specific theoretical projects as early modern and Romantic studies. It strikes me that that was and is a good thing.
3. My general experience (as student and professional) has been that those invested in theory are frequently small-c conservative in their actual attention to literary works. Rather a lot of high theory emerges from and, in turn, privileges "the canon," which means that it erases as much as it reveals.
4. In Book One, my ability to write about early histories of women emerged from the questions that feminists and poststructural theorists were then posing about historiography. But in working through the archives, I discovered that the questions did not result in the expected answers (in this case, I found that early women's history was rarely feminist [even by 19th-c. standards] and could not be appropriated as the literary "grandmothers" of contemporary women's history, nor did one find a woman's "voice" in these frequently-plagiarized texts). Similarly, Book Two developed from my interest in the theory of historical fiction, but once again, the archive highlighted the theory's limitations (most theories of historical fiction rest on assumptions about the nature of both history and the genre that make it impossible to "read" large swathes of material). Book Three and One Half will do something similar with current theoretical approaches to "religion and literature" (however you are defining that).