Projecting Neo-Victorianism: Review of Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations

Abstract

Over the past two decades, neo-Victorian studies have developed a range of theoretical frameworks and critical positions with which to understand the nature of contemporary engagements with the Victorians, and have begun to ‘canonise’ particular fictional texts as most illustrative of, or crucial to, the field. While the term ‘neo-Victorian’ appears to have found favour – rather than ‘retro-Victorian’ or ‘post-Victorian’, for example – the temporal, aesthetic, geographic and generic boundaries of the field are less clear. As a relatively new field that draws multiply upon Victorian studies, contemporary and historical fiction studies, as well as upon insights gained from postcolonialism, memory studies and trauma studies, it seems important to reflect critically upon its definitions and boundaries, as well as upon the assumptions that might begin to shape its formation. It is this work in which Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture participates. In their introduction to the volume, Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss refer a number of times to the ‘neo-Victorian project’ (pp. 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11), a term they appear to use interchangeably with ‘neo-Victorianism’ to encompass neo-Victorian creative texts and academic critiques of them. Deployed also by Marie-Luise Kohlke in the first essay of the volume (pp. 22, 26), this is an intriguing term to use in place of a neo-Victorian ‘field’, or neo-Victorian ‘studies’. It implies deliberate strategising, careful planning and the pursuit of defined goals, and raises a set of questions about whose project this is, whose needs it serves, what constitutes it, and what its aims might be. Does the ‘project’ belong to the myriad writers and creative artists whose work explores, reworks and recreates the Victorian period today? Is this the way they themselves conceptualise their creative output? Or is it the academic discussion, with its definitions, boundary-setting and canon formation that functions as a ‘project’? The term asserts a sense of coherence and cohesion that may, for now, stand in place of firmer boundaries and more rigid and agreed definitions of what neo-Victorianism is, thus, rhetorically at least, reining-in more capacious understandings of what constitutes the field lest it become too amorphous in its inclusivity. Yet it also seems to connect with the more imperialistic strains of neo-Victorianism, with its designs on the nineteenth-century past as mirror, foil or origin of the present. While the editors do not explain their choice of this term or explore its implications, the questions it provokes, about intentionality, function and purpose, are, in a sense, those that structure the collection