Abstract:

Recently, there has been a notably creative interest in the Victorian culture and literature, generating a wave of neo-Victorian novels within this cultural milieu or historical awareness. Through the term “neo-Victorian novel” we should refer to fiction which is “self-consciously engaged with the act of reinterpretation, rediscovery and revision concerning the Victorians.”1 Therefore, neo-Victorian fiction should be more than the fiction which turns its face to the nineteenth century. As Ann Heilmann asserts, “all fiction post-1901 that happen to have a Victorian setting or re-write a Victorian text or a Victorian character do not have to be neo-Victorian.”2 As an intellectual and cultural mode, neo-Victorian represents a wide range of experimentation in genre formations and narratological traditions. Though the neo-Victorian novelist seeks to reshape Victorian novel practice, some critics like Heilmann states that “in many cases, it seems that the neo-Victorian novelist cannot offer any other alternatives and thus the neo- Victorian marks a return to the classic form of the nineteenth-century novel in a way that, structurally at least, seems often to negate the experiments of the modernist movement”. This opens up the discussion of whether or not the postmodern reader wants more from the neo-Victorian writer and expects “narrative innovation, fragmentation, and the invention of the new forms” instead of traditional modes of the Victorian novel and its strategies. 

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