Objects in mirror are closer than they appear: On the nature of fictional returns to the nineteenth century

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the recent boom of neo-Victorian narratives in today's literary and mass culture production and to analyze the nature of these fictional returns to the nineteenth century. The paper comments on the global nature of the trend, which seems to transcend the British context and resonate within the wider postmodern cultural framework. The approaches taken by neo-Victorian texts have been very diverse, as have critical reactions to them, ranging from revisionary narratives seeking to unearth marginal voices previously absent from the Victorian text to playful reinventions of well-known figures or tropes highlighting their own artificiality. What most of them share is the desire to revisit and reassess the predominant notions of the Victorian held today and to investigate the potential investment of contemporary cultural discourse in the continuation or discontinuation of such representations.