Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture (review)

NeoVictorianism has become a pervasive term in recent years. In the course of its increasing proliferation, it has been applied to very different redeployments of the Victorians' changing afterlives as well as to a new field of research specialising in the analysis of this cultural phenomenon. Its shifting meaning teases us with its turns and returns. The elision of the hyphen indicated in Victorian Turns, NeoVictorian Returns, although to an extent a purely stylistic matter, may well be seen to signal the consolidation of a recognisable category. But the individual contributions in this collection do more than merely examine the sheer variety of a popular subgenre that can now boast its own classics such as John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) or David Lodge's Nice Work (1988). Chapters on an ongoing fictional remaking of the past are paired with reassessments of the intertextual exchanges that already characterised the reworked Victorian texts. Reading the Victorians' own awareness of literary influence in conjunction with neoVictorian "turns" upon the "original" texts helps complicate the changing reason for reshaping narratives about the Victorian period in critical as well as literary discourse.

The collection's two-part structure facilitates a comparative charting of the manifold "turns in cultural perspective, and the preoccupation with historical change and reversal, that fascinated the Victorians and continue to compel our attention" (2). In underscoring the richness and diversity of Victorian literature while situating its reassessment alongside a critical investigation of its most creative revamping, this collection offers significantly more than yet another study of contemporary neoVictorianism. The most important "turn" in the first part invokes the dynamics of intertextual interchange within nineteenth-century fiction—reminding us of the novel's significance for the Victorians as the genre to manage best the various ideologies of the day. Comparative readings of canonical and non-canonical nineteenth-century writing bring out such interchanges most clearly and therefore not surprisingly make up a considerable number of the essays in the book's first half. Discussions of the impact European intellectual life had on such different Victorian writers as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Margaret Oliphant are juxtaposed with close readings of France's literary function in Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) or Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). This twofold remapping of the Continent as Victorian Britain's most pervasive "other" dovetails with a tracing of literary influences across the globe. Elizabeth Webby's detailed overview of Eliot's reception in Australia thus parallels both Joanne Shattock's chapter on Gaskell's and Eliot's representations of women in France and Joanne Wilkes's discussion of Eliot's French "rivals" as filtered through Oliphant's periodical writing. At the same time, this focus anticipates the new centrality of the traditional margins, including specifically Australasia, in a current revisioning of a global nineteenth-century culture.

Whereas a foregrounding of literary influence beyond the confines of British fiction, in fact, points forward to postcolonial approaches—and increasingly, their further rewriting—it would nevertheless be misleading to assume a mere dichotomy of fiction past and present. On the contrary, such neat binaries are dismantled. Not only do ongoing rewritings suggest a triangulation of intertextual interchanges, but a thoroughgoing questioning of periodisation allows the simultaneous reassessment of a "long nineteenth century" in which Thomas De Quincey, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft are shown to have an important impact on later fiction. R. S. White's reading of John Keats and Eliot's Lydgate in Middlemarch (1871–72) as two "disappointed doctors" is particularly thought-provoking as it cuts across timelines and reads together an early-nineteenth-century poet and a fictional character in a mid-Victorian historical novel. Their pairing reveals "the complex and uneasy ways in which the world of literature interacted with social realities in the nineteenth century" (26), prompting us to rethink the confines...