519 Result(s)
within
British and Irish Literature
Fiction
Literary Theory
Twentieth-Century Literature
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Book
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Book
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Book
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Chapter
Conclusion: ‘What will count as history?’
This book has traced the re-creation of the Victorian era in recent historical fictions, focusing on novels by Graham Swift, A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys and Gail Jones. It has argued that that t...
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Introduction: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’
In 1918 Ezra Pound coined the term ‘Victoriana’ as a way of pejoratively characterising the Victorian past: ‘For most of us, the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant … that we are content to leave the ...
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Memory Texts: History, Fiction and the Historical Imaginary
It is, perhaps, no coincidence that neo-Victorian fiction achieves momentum at around the time when personal memory of the Victorians was slip** away. By the 1980s there could be few, if any, Victorians left...
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A Fertile Excess: Waterland, Desire and the Historical Sublime
For Tom Crick, the narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), history’s referent does not exist. ‘Reality is that nothing happens’ (40). Yet histories, stories and ‘making things happen’ proliferate, circulate ...
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Modernity, Modernism and the Past
Modernity is the epoch most conscious of history precisely because it is so conscious of itself as present soon to become past. Baudelaire’s poem ‘L’Horloge’ illustrates this awareness only too well. No sooner...
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‘Making it seem like it’s authentic’: the Faux-Victorian Novel as Cultural Memory in Affinity and Fingersmith
If Possession asserts the ‘truth of the imagination’, then Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) harness this truth to invent a genealogy of lesbian desire that exists only as shadows at the margins of Victorian...
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Antiquity and Modernity: Jacob’s Room and the ‘Greek Myth’
Modernity defines itself along the terms it sets up for antiquity. But, as was argued in Chapter 1, the relation between the two is not as unequivocal as it may at first seem. Instead, it is characterized by c...
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Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses and (Literary) Inheritances
When my mother died, a year or so back, it fell to my brother and me to clear her house. . . . She had a dual existence, tough and job-oriented during the day . . . while at home . . . she was closer to Miss H...
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Natural History and Historical Nature in To the Lighthouse and Other Fiction
Woolf’s experimentation with historiographical representation can also be shown to address the problematic, fundamental to any historical thinking, of the relation between nature and history and its attendant ...
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Sex and Science: Bodily and Textual (Re)Inscriptions
If the political re-visioning impulse of contemporary neo-Victorian fiction has a key theme aside from race and empire, it is the interrogation of gender and sexuality as constructed and regulated through the ...
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This Stage of History: Between the Acts and the Destruction of Tradition
It has been forcefully asserted that in ‘none of her other novels is Woolf as conscious of and responsive to contemporary events as in Between the Acts’, her last novel.2 The increasing menace of war filled Woolf...
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Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic
The previous chapter explored the theme of spectrality and haunting as metaphor for the influence the Victorian continues to hold over the contemporary imagination and the ways in which neo-Victorian texts enc...
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Contemporary Victorian(ism)s
Even in the twenty-first century we inhabit Victorian urban space. The streets and buildings are a palimpsest, but these reinscriptions never effect the full erasure of the past and this, at times, produces a ...
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Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in Constellation with Walter Benjamin
Virginia Woolf has been celebrated as an innovative modernist who broke with past traditions, greatly contributing to changing the future of the novel as well as women’s place in cultural production. Paradoxic...
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(Dis)Possessing Knowledge: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance
In April 1992, in an article for Newsweek entitled ‘Don’t Undo Our Work’, Margaret Thatcher claimed that during her terms as prime minister ‘we reclaimed our heritage’ (Thatcher, 1992). As we have seen, her platf...
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Theories of History, Models of Historiography
‘History’ as a term combines the ontological with the epistemological in as much as it refers both to the past and our representations of the past. Since we only have access to the past through its representat...
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Introduction
The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy’s personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic gen...
