Title History and cultural memory in neo-Victorian fiction : Victorian afterimages / Kate Mitchell

Published Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 222 pages) Contents Introduction: "I told you we'd been invaded by Victoriana" -- Memory texts: history, fiction and the historical imaginary -- Contemporary Victorian(ism)s -- A fertile excess: waterland, desire and the historical sublime -- (Dis)possessing knowledge: A.S. Byatt's Possession: a romance -- "Making it seem like it's authentic": the faux-Victorian novel as cultural memory in Affinity and fingersmith -- 'The alluring patina of loss': photography, memory, and memory texts in Sixty lights and Afterimage -- Conclusion: what will count as history? Summary History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians' own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction's contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and nmnenonic function today. This ebook is participating in an experiment and is available Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence. Users are free to disseminate and reuse the ebook. The licence does not however permit commercial exploitation or the creation of derivative works without specific permission. To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0. For more information about the experiment visit our FAQs Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-214) and index Notes English Subject Historical fiction, English -- History and criticism English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism English fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism History in literature. Collective memory in literature. Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History -- 21st century Literary studies: from c 1900 -. Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Literature. Collective memory in literature English fiction Historical fiction, English Historiography History in literature Literature and history SUBJECT Great Britain -- History -- Victoria, 1837-1901 -- Historiography Subject Great Britain Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780230283121 0230283128

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