INSTITUTIONAL DIGITAL REPOSITORY

Rewriting the Victoriana: History, memory, and fiction in select neo-Victorian novels

Show simple item record

dc.contributor.author Shekher, A.
dc.date.accessioned 2025-10-22T11:43:44Z
dc.date.available 2025-10-22T11:43:44Z
dc.date.issued 2025-03-04
dc.identifier.uri http://dspace.iitrpr.ac.in:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/4941
dc.description.abstract This thesis critically examines canonical and marginal neo-Victorian works through the lens of postmodernist self-reflexivity and their replicatory consumption of Victorian themes. It explores the interplay of memory, historical fiction, and imagination in contemporary representations of the Victorian era, particularly in an age marked by cultural amnesia. Central to this study is the establishment of nostalgic recollection as a subversive structuring principle of neo-Victorian fiction. Employing a postmodernist framework, the research interrogates contemporary authors’ fascination with the Victorian past, aligning with Lyotard’s conceptualization of postmodernism as a form of radical subjective fictionality that eschews mimesis and organic unity. The study engages four critical perspectives—metafictional engagement, the neo Victorian sensation novel, postmodern anxiety, and nostalgic revisionism—using an array of theoretical paradigms, including historiographical metafiction (Hutcheon, Munslow), Levinasian alterity, and Svetlana Boym’s theorization of nostalgia. The corpus of texts analyzed includes A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Angels and Insects, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and Affinity, Graham Swift’s Ever After, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Emma Tennant’s Tess. Key findings reveal that Byatt employs metafiction not merely as an aesthetic device but as a means to destabilize historical and fictional reliability, challenging the privileging of creative over critical narratives. Waters’ neo-Victorian fiction subverts the heteronormative constructs of the Thatcherite socio-political landscape, positioning her characters as anti-family, transgressive figures. Swift’s Ever After articulates a postmodern anxiety distinct from its Victorian Darwinian counterpart, emerging from encounters with the Victorian ‘Other’. Finally, revisionist neo-Victorian novels enact a dual nostalgic impulse—restorative and reflective— wherein the Victorian past is both reimagined and interrogated, coalescing into what this study terms “neo-nostalgia”. The thesis concludes that rather than being imprisoned in a Jamesonian pastiche, neo-Victorian fiction enacts an abrogation of tradition through its apparent fidelity to it. It situates the intellectual tensions of the present within the ostensibly harmonious polyphony of the past, addressing the Nietzschean dilemma of historical engagement. In reorienting the conservative notion of nostalgia, this research contributes to the critical discourse on neo-Victorian fiction as an academic discipline that actively negotiates the intersections of history, memory, and fiction rather than engaging in antiquarian retrospection. en_US
dc.language.iso en_US en_US
dc.subject Cultural Amnesia en_US
dc.subject Historical Fiction en_US
dc.subject Neo-Victorian en_US
dc.subject Nostalgia en_US
dc.subject Postmodernism en_US
dc.title Rewriting the Victoriana: History, memory, and fiction in select neo-Victorian novels en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US


Files in this item

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record

Search DSpace


Advanced Search

Browse

My Account