Mark Llewellyn

Conflict and difference in nineteenth-century literature

How should we understand Victorian cultural conflict? The Victorians were fiercely disputatious, divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literary culture of the period, and the essays in this collection propose new ways of understanding their significance. Ranging from detailed readings of key literary figures (Browning, Collins, Dickens, Eliot) to explorations of cross-period themes (the philosophical roots of conflict; dreams and psychology; consumption; imperialism and race) or specific literary movements or moments (Chartism; journalism; writing of the Afghan War; New Woman novels), they address diverse areas of intellectual inquiry about what mattered most to the Victorians. These essays speak collectively in arguing for a reinterpretation of literary and cultural conflict through a greater critical awareness of the productive analyses available within such debates over difference in the period. The aim is not to resolve conflicted cultural moments or movements, but to explore the slippages and instabilities which so fascinated, intrigued and inspired the Victorians themselves.

Neo-victorianism: on the ethics and aesthetics of appropriation

1. All middleand upper-class Victorian wives are Sexually Frustrated, Emotionally Unfulfilled, and possibly Physically Abused. If they’re lucky, however, they may find Fulfillment with a) a man not their husband, b) a man not their husband and of the Laboring Classes, c) a man not their husband and of Another Race, or d) a woman not their, er, husband. 2. Christians may be Good, as long as they are not evangelicals. Evangelicals, however, are Bad, and frequently Hypocritical. 3. All heroes and heroines are True Egalitarians who disregard all differences of Class, Race, and Sex. Heroines, in particular, are given to behaving in Socially Unacceptable Ways, which is always Good. 4. All heroes and heroines are Instinctively Admired by members of Oppressed Populations. 5. Any outwardly respectable man will a) have frequent recourse to Prostitutes, b) have a Dark Secret, and=or c) be Jack the Ripper. 6. There must be at least one Prostitute, who will be an Alcoholic and=or have a Heart of Gold. If the novel is about a prostitute, however, she will have at least one Unusual Talent not related to her line of work. 7. All children are subject to frequent Physical, Emotional, and Sexual Abuse. Nevertheless, they will grow up to become Sensitive and Caring Adults.

Breaking the Mould? Sarah Waters and the Politics of Genre

As many of the chapters in this book demonstrate, historical fiction has become increasingly prominent during the last twenty years. In this final chapter, I want to explore ‘historical fiction in action’ by providing an overview of one of its current, most visible and popular practitioners: Sarah Waters. My interest in this piece is to bring together some of the issues that have been raised throughout this volume in relation to the present condition of ‘women’s’ historical fiction and suggest ways in which we might read the self-reflective strain in contemporary works in this genre.

Hystorical fictions: Women (re)writing and (re)reading history

ORBIDDEN histories are the only stories worth reading, or so Oscar Wilde might have phrased it. But what is it about history that suggests the secret or forbidden, and why should contemporary women authors display such eagerness to rewrite it? The closing decades of the twentieth century and first years of the new millennium have seen a growing trend towards historical fiction in women’s writing; Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Tracy Chevalier, Margaret Forster, Valerie Martin, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, Katie Roiphe, Adhaf Soueif, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and many others not discussed in this special issue have made history and their characters’ personal and political engagements with, entanglements in, and possessive desires of the past a central F w A N N H E I L M A N N A N D M A R K L L E W E L L Y N .......................................................................................................

Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians

Hybridity is . . . the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority). . . . [T]he colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted on the site of desire, making its objects at once disciplinary and disseminatory . . . a negative transparency. If discriminatory effects enable the authorities to keep an eye on them, their proliferating difference evades that eye . . . Those discriminated against may be instantly recognized, but they also force a recognition of the immediacy and articulacy of authority – a disturbing effect that is familiar in the repeated hesitancy afflicting the colonialist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated subjects: the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots. . . . [Hybridity] reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion[.]

Spectrality, S(p)ecularity, and Textuality: Or, Some Reflections in the Glass

Alfred Lord Tennyson to Coldplay via Vernon Lee might normally make for a tenuous line of enquiry and yet all three quotations given above reflect, albeit in different ways, on the idea of spectrality, specularity, ghosts, the dead, and the living. The historical pull of the past, the configuration of the present through the timeworn lens, and the melancholic nostalgia which is always a foreboding of our own mortality are each (dis)embodied in our awareness of a sensory reality that is fragile, transient, and yet endures beyond ourselves. One might think here of Slavoj Ž i ž ek’s Lacanian ‘philosophy of the real as absent, non-existent’ (Belsey, 2004, p. 5) and the impact this has on our rereading and re-visioning of the past through fiction, itself in some ways a non-real construct. The past is forever a reflection that our individual human future is not limitless, and in that sense ensures that our return to history and our belief in something beyond the here and now are indivisibly linked within the imagination. For the Victorians, such earthly limitations were accepted and acceptable while the persistence of the soul in an immortal condition held sway; after the religious crises of the mid-nineteenth century, such certainties were replaced or perhaps shadowed by faith in a spiritual world of ghosts, seances, and a different plane of existence.

Feminisms, sex and the body

This is an introduction for the Journal of Gender Studies discussing the feminisms, sex and the body debate.

A Past of Her Own: History and the Modernist Woman Writer

The articles collected in this special issue were originally all delivered as papers at the ‘Hystorical Fictions: Women, History and Authorship’ conference we organised at the University of Wales, Swansea, in August 2003. When we began planning the event – writing the call for papers; contacting academics we thought might be interested in attending – we anticipated that, given the recent prominence of ‘historical fiction’ by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Tracy Chevalier, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and others, a large number of speakers would want to focus on contemporary women writers’ uses of history. What proved most interesting, however, was the way in which this trend of, to use Adrienne Rich’s term, feminist ‘re-visioning’,1 viewed by so many critics and readers as part of a postmodern literary culture, has its roots in the modernism of the early twentieth century. The modernist movement is generally viewed as holding the twin imperatives of moving into the future while addressing the continued presence of the past and of tradition. T. S. Eliot, who built his quintessentially modernist text The Waste Land on the foundations of the traditional literary canon, declared in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that for the male artist and poet ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously ... His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’.2 History and literary tradition are thus the cornerstones of high modernism. Yet while the relationship of male modernist writers like Eliot, Joyce and Yeats with history and (literary) tradition has been the subject of much critical discussion,3 and although seminal feminist work of the last two decades has established the significance of

Gender and sexuality

Volume 1. Marriage and Motherhood: Mona Cairds The Morality of Marriage [1897] and the Contemporary Response Volume 2. The New Woman and Female Independence Volume 3. New Woman Fiction (1): Marriage, Motherhood and Work Volume 4. New Woman Fiction (2): Gender and Sexuality Volume 5. Literary Degenerates

Authenticity, authority and the author: the sugared voice of the neo-victorian in The crimson petal and the white

The genre of neo-Victorianism — contemporary novels set in the nineteenth century with a distinctive metafictional element to their portrayal of the historical as literature — relies upon a variety of textual and narratological motifs and tricks in order to play at convincing its readers of the authenticity and authority surrounding the fiction they are reading.1 Such encounters between fabrication and fiction and the factual performativity implied by the assumption of an ‘historical’ voice regularly move towards varying degrees of mimicry, pastiche or ventriloquism, even when grounded in the postmodernism referenced by this opening quotation from Michel Faber. In writing about the Victorians, the contemporary novelist frequently seeks to present writing like the Victorians. There is an ambivalence here concerning both the mission and the method. One of the most frequently cited neo-Victorian novels that provides this kind of knowing assumption of ventriloquism is A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning Possession: a Romance (1990). In that novel, Byatt generates pastiche texts for her fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.