A Study Of Parody In Neo-Victorian Fiction

Neo-Victorian fiction is a category of contemporary works that revisit,revise and reconstruct the Victorian era and culture.Parody is a writing technique and a phenomenon that widely exists in this kind of works.It marks the beginning of this genre and shapes its research path.However,since parody can not fully represent the general attitude of the neo-Victorian toward the Victorian past,researchers soon put it aside.Thus parody in neo-Victorian fiction has not been studied in depth.With three representative neo-Victorian novels,Alias Grace(1996)by Margaret Atwood,Affinity(1999)by Sarah Waters and A Jealous Ghost(2005)by A.N.Wilson,as the main objects of study,this thesis examines the functions of parody in this literary phenomenon.It aims to answer the following questions.Why parody is necessary for neo-Victorian fiction's reconstruction of the past?Why does parody often turn to the present?What are the requirements conveyed through parody for readers of neo-Victorian fiction?What is the role of parody in the development of this genre?Through close reading and analysis of the parodies in these three neo-Victorian novels,the thesis points out the dilemmas that might exist in exploring and imagining the past and demonstrates how parody helps deal with these dilemmas.First of all,literary paradigms,language patterns and genres conventionalized with time hinder the utterance of the experience of people who were excluded from historical records.Parody,a literary technique with a dual structure,can on the one hand preserve the original memory and on the other hand,by transforming the writing frame that rejects certain expressions,inflectively convey the living conditions of the marginalized and oppressed groups in history,thus effectively supplementing historical memory.Second,the neo-Victorian is also limited by its own contemporary perspective,so it cannot and does not intend to provide "an objective panorama" of the Victorian era.By means of parody,novelists "automatize" the theoretical discourses on which neo-Victorian fiction rests.In other words,they foreground and problematize this genre's employment of these discourses through parodying them.In the meantime,parody is used to subvert readers'inherent reading patterns and expectations,so that the writers can deliver the message of their self-awareness of the limitation of contemporary historical reconstruction to their readers.Finally,English established as a discipline in the Victorian era has encountered a crisis in contemporary times.The mechanization of academic literary research and its detachment from real life have made many novelists suspicious of and hostile to academic literary criticism.Parody works as a mediator transforming the friction between creation and criticism into inexhaustible creativity,thus opening up a new space of criticism beside the existing one,so that neo-Victorian literature can be constantly generated and updated in the process of the mutual refinement between creation and criticism.Both the past and the present can be the target of parody in neo-Victorian fiction.Parody urges this genre not only to consider and reconstruct its relationship with the Victorian past but also to reflect on itself.The intention in parody means that a writer incorporates his critical perspective into a parody structure and a reader strives to recognize and work out the critical distance in the parody.In the flows of intentions between its participants,neo-Victorian fiction gains its sustained momentum.Therefore,this thesis argues that the "relationship between the past and the present"highlighted by previous research alone is not enough to define neo-Victorian fiction and that new neo-Victorian research and creation also constitute dialogues with existing neo-Victorian products.It is in its own constant changes and the constant revisiting of the past at the same time that neo-Victorian fiction maintains its openness and development potential.