Victorian Metafiction

Victorian Metafiction
Author: Tabitha Sparks
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2022-11-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081394872X

Critics agree in the abstract that "metafiction" refers to any novel that draws attention to its own fictional construction, but metafiction has been largely associated with the postmodern era. In this innovative new book Tabitha Sparks identifies a sustained pattern of metafiction in the Victorian novel that illuminates the art and intentions of its female practitioners. From the mid-nineteenth century through the fin de siècle, novels by Victorian women such as Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Riddell, Eliza Lynn Linton, and several New Women authors share a common but underexamined trope: the fictional characterization of the woman novelist or autobiographer. Victorian Metafiction reveals how these novels systemically dispute the assumptions that women wrote primarily about their emotions or were restricted to trivial, sentimental plots. Countering an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional, Sparks identifies the literary technique of metafiction in numerous novels by women writers and argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader’s attention to the book and not the novelist. By dislodging the narrative from these cultural prescriptions, Victorian Metafiction effectively argues how these women novelists presented the business and art of writing as the subject of the novel and wrote metafiction in order to establish their artistic integrity and professional authority.

Literature Against Criticism

Literature Against Criticism
Author: Martin Paul Eve
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2016-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1783742763

This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century. Martin Paul Eve’s engaging and far-reaching study explores the novel's contribution to the ongoing displacement of cultural authority away from university English. Spanning the works of Jennifer Egan, Ishmael Reed, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Waters, Percival Everett, Roberto Bolaño and many others, Literature Against Criticism forces us to re-think our previous notions about the relationship between those who write literary fiction and those who critique it.

Rewriting the Victorians

Rewriting the Victorians
Author: Andrea Kirchknopf
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786471344

The 19th century has become especially relevant for the present--as one can see from, for example, large-scale adaptations of written works, as well as the explosion of commodities and even interactive theme parks. This book is an introduction to the novelistic refashionings that have come after the Victorian age with a special focus on revisions of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. As post-Victorian research is still in the making, the first part is devoted to clarifying terminology and interpretive contexts. Two major frameworks for reading post-Victorian fiction are developed: the literary scene (authors, readers, critics) and the national-identity, political and social aspects. Among the works examined are Caryl Phillips's Cambridge, Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs, Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, D.M. Thomas's Charlotte, and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

London, Queer Spaces and Historiography in the Works of Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst

London, Queer Spaces and Historiography in the Works of Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst
Author: Júlia Braga Neves
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3839457343

Queer spaces are crucial for the construction of LGBTQ+ communities, as they constitute places where queer subjects can create political, social, and affective alliances. Júlia Braga Neves shows how these spaces are pivotal for the representation of queer history in the fictional works by the British authors Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst, whose characters and plots are articulated through and within London's sexual geographies. Considering the intersection between gender, sexuality, and class, this study engages with spatial, queer, feminist, and Marxist theories as a means to reflect on London, queer historiography, and the relationship between subject and urban space.

Steampunk London

Steampunk London
Author: Helena Esser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2024-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350433918

Tracing the genre through fiction, visual art, film and videogames from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between neo-Victorianism, urban spaces and Steampunk. Characterised by its interplay between past and present and its anachronistic retro-speculation, Neo-Victorian-infused Steampunk remixes modern collective memory to produce a re-imagined vision of Victorian London. Investigating how Steampunk's re-calibrated Londons both source from and subvert Victorian discourse about the city, Steampunk London offers a deeper understanding of how a popular cultural memory of the Victorian past is shaped and transmitted in light of present-day identity politics. Covering key themes including retrofuturism, gender and sexuality, colonialism and postcolonialism, it considers such ideas as how early Steampunk synthesizes Victorian urban ethnography; how Victorian urban Gothic shapes shared transmedia memory to challenge reactionary, nostalgic meta-narratives; how Steampunk video games mobilize urban space as an immersive storytelling device with cities open to play; and how Steampunk interprets the modern metropolis as an opportunity for feminist and queer agency. Through examination of Victorian-era writers from Charles Dickens to Arthur Conan Doyle, the book digs into works of fiction and media alike, looking at The Difference Engine, Soulless, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, cyberpunk classic Blade Runner, and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and The Order 1886. An important intervention in the study of steampunk, Helena Esser demonstrates how the works explored invite participatory consumption and considers the genre's potential- and failures- to interrogate and challenge our relationship with the Victorian past.

Recollecting John Fowles / Wiedererinnerungen an John Fowles

Recollecting John Fowles / Wiedererinnerungen an John Fowles
Author: Guido Isekenmeier
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2018
Genre: Essayists
ISBN: 3643139489

More than a decade after his death in 2005, this collection of essays celebrates the memory of John Fowles, one of the champions of early postmodernist literature in England. As the first publication of the German John Fowles Society, founded in 2015, the book brings together a collector, a translator and a handful of scholars who pay tribute to one of the most important voices in English fiction after World War II. Their contributions, which address The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, Daniel Martin and the unpublished Tesserae, bear testimony to Fowles's lasting fascination. Mehr als ein Jahrzehnt nach seinem Tod im Jahr 2005 erfährt die Erinnerung an John Fowles, einen der wenigen frühen englischen Vertreter einer postmodernistischen Poetik, durch diese Aufsatzsammlung neue Impulse. Die Beiträge in diesem Band, der ersten Veröffentlichung der 2015 gegründeten Deutschen John-Fowles-Gesellschaft, behandeln einige seiner wichtigsten Texte ( Der Magus, Die Geliebte des französischen Leutnants, Der Ebenholzturm, Daniel Martin sowie die unveröffentlichten Mosaiksteine) aus der Perspektive eines Sammlers, eines Übersetzers und einer Handvoll Literaturwissenschaftler und zollen der andauernden Faszination seiner Texte Tribut.

Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative

Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative
Author: L. Hadley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2010-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230317499

Placing the popular genre of neo-Victorian fiction within the context of the contemporary cultural fascination with the Victorians, this book argues that these novels are distinguished by a commitment to historical specificity and understands them within their contemporary context and the context of Victorian historical and literary narratives.

Inner and Outer Worlds

Inner and Outer Worlds
Author: Anthony Uhlmann FAHA
Publisher: Sydney University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1743327803

Gail Jones is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high schools and universities across the country. This collection of essays offers reflections on Jones’ fiction by leading Australian and international literary critics. For readers who loved Sixty Lights, Five Bells, Sorry and Jones’ other novels, and for students of Jones’ work, this book will be an illuminating companion. With chapters on her use of language, her thematic preoccupations, and her place in local and global literary culture, it is a timely guide to the work of an exceptional Australian writer.

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction

Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction
Author: Hsu-Ming Teo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040085415

This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.

Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction

Adventurous Women in Contemporary American Historical Fiction
Author: Jeannette King
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3030941264

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these writers engage with the literature of the past, including the American canon of male fiction which dominated literary history before the intervention of feminist scholars. The book begins with an introduction to the history of historical fiction and provides a theoretical, historical and geographical context for the novels themselves.