| One trend within the postmodern "return to history" is the revisiting of Victorian texts, themes, and settings in a number of recent English and American novels. Although often tinged with a sense of loss, these novels do more than invoke the sort of nostalgia with which Fredric Jameson indicts postmodern historicity by not simply imitating Victorian texts, but rather revising them within the perspectives of the present cultural moment. This dissertation reads several such novels and the Victorian texts with which they establish a critical dialogue as expressing cultural anxieties common to both periods: the nature of history, the question of design (authorial as well as providential), the dichotomy between spirit and matter, and the woman question. I demonstrate both that the neo-Victorian novels represent more complicated versions of the nineteenth century than those invoked in current cultural and political discourse, and that their precursors themselves offer surprisingly unstable visions of the Victorian world.; In Chapter One, I read A. S. Byatt's Possession, Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton, and George Eliot's Middlemarch as commentaries on the recursive and fictive nature of historical knowledge. Chapter Two shows that employment in Dickens's Bleak House and Great Expectations raises doubts about providential design and narrative conventions that are fully brought out in Charles Palliser's The Quincunx. In Chapter Three, I show that Victorians saw Darwinian evolutionary theory as far more than simply a threat to spiritual faith. Byatt's The Conjugial Angel and Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding explore relations between the spirit and matter in Victorian settings and terms, thereby illuminating Tennyson's and the age's fascination with the concept of material bodies. In the final chapter, Alasdair Gray's Poor Things extends the social critique of William Thackeray by depicting explicitly conditions to which Thackeray could only allude: the ways in which Victorian prosperity and morality disguised a multitude of sins, in particular the degradation of women and the poor. The Epilogue treats Ackroyd's English Music as epitomizing the neo-Victorian strategy of invoking the past as a means of renewal while avoiding the nostalgia trap Jameson views as characteristic of postmodern historicity. |
