Renaissances, Resurrections and Rewritings: A Neo-Victorian Poetics of Exhumation

Abstract

In both Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) the contemporary protagonists find new life in the unearthing of Victorian documents and in this combination of contemporary and Victorian renaissances might be detected the assumption that the revival of the past always already entails a revival of the present. It is the purpose of this paper to try and show that these novels’ determination ‘to take the skeleton remains of a single life and to breathe into them their former actuality’ (Ever After 90), far from being restricted to the diegetic sphere, extends to the very poetic principles of these neo-Victorian works. By overlapping, alternating or combining the voices of the dead and the voices of the living, by interweaving the remains of the past and the reconstructions of the present, by adapting and diversifying their discursive modes according to the referential sources, and by blurring the ontological status of their historical archives, these novels manage to carry out novelistic innovation. It is then the coincidence between the meaning of the prefix neo- in neo-Victorianism and the prefix re- in renaissance that this presentation will seek to highlight underscoring the structures of discontinuous continuities which endow these novels with new life and new aesthetic forms emphatically distinct from those of their Victorian forebears. The renaissances at stake in these neo-Victorian works concern then both a work of testimony and a work of creation, both an exploration of history and a re-enchantment of the present.