Adaptive/appropriative reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too

Abstract

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.