Serial Pleasures: The Influence of Television on the Victorian Novel

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Plotz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Long Form ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Serial Television

The contemporary success of serial television as a dominant long-form narrative artwork presents both perils and possibilities for critics interested in analogous forms in previous eras. TV dramas that viewers can follow from season to season generate a sustained, often years-long, engagement between viewer and depicted world, a very different relationship between viewer and artwork from that which governed viewer relations to pre-TV Hollywood film—or indeed to the Victorian novel, even when serialized. Broad issues of contingency and intention, as well as more nuanced questions of ensemble participation and commercial broadcasting logic separate serial TV from the long-form narratives of the nineteenth century. In offering up parallels between how serialization worked in long-form narrative arts of previous eras and how serial television works now we risk overlooking how those structural differences shape the meaning of any particular work.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

The Story of an African Farm

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olive Schreiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
New Man ◽  
Female Nurse

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

scholarly journals Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Maria Lujan Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
World View ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Upheaval

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 207-213
Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
Point Model ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Functional Patterns ◽  
The Russian Empire

The Epilogue discusses the wider usability of the thirteen-point model of modern belonging. It briefly sketches avenues for comparative, inter- and trans-imperial studies across the nineteenth-century globe, starting with the Russian Empire and the case of the Finns. For example, as with the Bulgars, the field of education served as the backdrop, first, for the nurturing of vertical ties of loyalty to monarch and dynasty and, then, for their subtle transformation into horizontal (macro) communal-cum-ethnonational belonging. Institutional and other structural differences notwithstanding, there is a striking similarity of ceremonial channels and functional patterns whereby the cycles of ruler visibility and popular belonging unfolded in the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. Similar processes of mental centralisation, which paralleled other ongoing forms of centralisation – fiscal, administrative, infrastructural and so on, went on in many other state formations across the globe in the course of the nineteenth century.

Adaptive/appropriative reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too

Interventions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Adaptive Reuse ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Historic Conservation ◽  
Adaptive Practice

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.

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