Article2001

Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel

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Contemporary Literature and Criticism Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics Modernist Literature and Criticism

Abstract

Introduction. Part I: Pastiche, pastiche: the fascination of Victorianism. Chapter 1: Victorian echoes: resurrected voices. The epigraphs, or the voices of the masters. The quotational practice: an aesthetic surplus. The derivative nature of pastiche. The parodic transformation of voices: depreciation or homage? The foregrounding of Victorian outcasts: the voices of postmodern fashion. When Victorian voices invade a whole novel... Chapter 2: On the surface of the looking glass: an aesthetic and ideological model. 'The fascination of Narrative'. The metonymic pole. The documentary aspect. David Lodge's Nice Work: plus ca change... A.S. Byatt's Possession: 'making the past your world'. Part II: Postmodernism as otherness: the temptation of revisitation. Chapter 1: The parodic vein: ludic subversion. The disfigurement of the great Victorian figures. When playfulness becomes a guiding principle. Invigorating the new with the old: the regenerative art of parody in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. Chapter 2: Postmodern strategies of distanciation. An in-depth change of the surface. An aesthetics of the unsavoury. The delights of uncertainty. Fragmentation as the new consensus. The epitome of late twentieth-century postmodernist aesthetics: Graham Swift's Ever After. Part III: Nostalgic Postmodernism: the paradox of an iconoclastic homage. Chapter 1: The limits of subversion: the tyranny of the politically correct. The precedents of modernism and early postmodernism. Further qualifications and clarifications. A favourable climate or a profitable vein. Sex and crinolines: a combination aimed at seduction. How to be subversive and seductive at the same time: D.M. Thomas's Charlotte: The final journey of Jane Eyre. Chapter 2: Postmodernism and the past: An ambiguous relation to the Victorian ancestors. An equivocal kinship. Nostalgic subversion: an oxymoric art. Evolution, not revolution: postmodernism as illustrated by retro-Victorian fiction. Conclusion. Works Cited. Index.

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2008What is neo-victorian studies?2010History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction 2010History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction 2013Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus 2009Neo-Victorianism: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Appropriation 2008Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories: photography, spectrality and historical fiction in Afterimage and Sixty Lights

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