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In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of neo-historical fiction in Britain. Fuelled by a renewed and ever-growing interest in the past, neo-historical texts revisit and re-write historical epochs from a contemporary perspective. Neo-Victorianism is a particular strand of writing situated within this literary practice, engaging with the Victorian era (1837-1901) in a number of ways. Not only does the neo-Victorian text "write back to something in the nineteenth century, it does so in a manner that often aims to re-fresh and re-vitalise the importance of that earlier text to the here and now" (Llewellyn 170). When author Sarah Waters was asked in 2008 why she thought neo-Victorianism had experienced such a hype in the past twenty years, she answered:
"I've sometimes thought that it's a way of addressing issues that are still very, very current in British culture, like class and gender, and submerged sexuality or sexual underworlds. Things that we think we're pretty cool with, and actually we're not at all, and we keep on wanting to go back to the nineteenth century to play these out on a bigger scale, precisely because they're still very current for us."
In this course, we are going to look at three texts that all deal with issues which were often eclipsed, neglected, or presented in a one-sided manner in canonical Victorian literature, e.g. slavery and colonial exploitation in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), sexuality and adultery in A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), and homosexuality and pornography in Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002).
Texts: Please purchase the following editions and read Wide Sargasso Sea before the start of term.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Hilary Jenkins. London: Penguin Student Editions, 2001. Print.
ISBN-10: 0140818030 ISBN-13: 978-0140818031
Byatt, A.S. Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage, 1991. Print.
ISBN-10: 0099800403 ISBN-13: 978-0099800408
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith. London: Virago, 2005. Print.
ISBN-10: 1860498833 ISBN-13: 978-1860498831 |
