Historical Narrative In Contemporary Neo-Victorian Novel

The last few decades have witnessed an upsurge of interest in Victorianism in British mass culture, which aroused the curiosity of postmodernist novelists to revisit, reinvent and reconstruct Victorian past from contemporary revisionist perspectives. As an important literary and cultural phenomenon, Neo-Victorian Novel emerged in the1960s with the publication of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. However, it was not until1990s that such a phenomenon caused enough attention from the critical circle.This dissertation focuses on the historical narrative in Neo-Victorian Novel. My analysis starts from the reading of Neo-Victorian novel as the haunting "topos" of Victorian Specters, which are brought back to life by postmodernist novelists and are open to an encounter with contemporary readers. In this way, Neo-Victorian Novel establishes a dialogue between the dead (Victorian ancestors) and the living (us), encourages us to speak with the dead, and calls into question the certitude of our historical knowledge.Chapter one examines the Victorian age and its distorted images reflected through the "Rearview Mirror" of contemporary ideology. Historical narrative is illustrated as an important narrative strategy for postmodernist rewritings and is discussed in both formal and ideological dimensions. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles depicts a reserved, hypocritical Victorian "realm of reason", compared with our postmodern reality. In Possession and Angels and Insects, A. S. Byatt deeply explores the inner souls of the Victorians, positing them in intense conflicts between Darwinism and Spiritualism, two seemingly incompatible and equally controversial ideas of the period. In Waterland and Ever After, the Victorian Age is presented alternately as a progressive "realm of reason" and a nostalgic "strange country" for contemporary protagonists. As the two ages are usually juxtaposed synchronically in Neo-Victorian Novel, it defamiliarizes our preconceptions of the Victorian Age, and history thus betrays an unfamiliar face.Chapter two discusses Metahistorical Romance as a frequently adopted narrative mode in Neo-Victorian Novel, through a close reading of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Possession and Ever After. Considering the changing circumstances in1990s, I prefer Metahistorical Romance to Historiographic Metafiction, when depicting the peculiar characteristics of Neo-Victorian Novel; therein Romantic elements are used or abused pervasively. Special attention is paid to the complicated functioning mechanism among Romance, Historiography and Metafiction, which self-reflexively problematizes traditional historical narrative in both theoretical and aesthetical dimensions. Firstly, the combination of metafiction with historiography puts our certitude of historical knowledge under interrogation. Secondly, the juxtaposition of Romance and Realistic historiography further blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, and challenges the very nature of historical reality.Chapter three turns to the narrative time and space. Neo-Victorian Novel no longer subscribes to a secular and linear sense of time; instead it undermines temporal linearity by positing a multiplicity of "times", and thus establishes a spatial history filled with fragments and anachronism. In the case of The French Lieutenant's Woman, I investigate the conceptual metaphor on time in the novel, i.e."Time is a Room", which reveals Fowles' view of spatial time, closely connected with Sartrean existentialism and freedom. In Possession and Angles and Insects, Women's Time is foregrounded by A. S. Byatt. Distinguished from men's progressive linear time, Women's Time always remains cyclical/monumental. Byatt traces and rewrites women's history by breaking traditional temporal linearity in her cyclical narrative structure. In Waterland and Ever After, Swift explores time in the sense of natural history. Time is presented in line with free association of ideas in the protagonists' memory and recollection, thus it is similar with network structure.Chapter four focuses on the narrative voices. In Neo-Victorian Novel, the open structure of spatial narrative invites different voices to engage in dialogues between the past and the present. Three types of dialogues are closely examined: dialogue between the author and his characters(The French Lieutenant's Woman), dialogue between the living and the dead (Possession and Angles and Insects), dialogue between the center and the marginal (Waterland). Based on various voices afore-mentioned, Neo-Victorian Novel establishes a dialogic mode of history and the single authorative voice from traditional Grand Narrative is totally at stake.Conclusion is a critical reassessment. On one hand, the spectral presence of the Victorian past in Neo-Victorian Novel shows a postmodern nostalgic yearning for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present; one the other hand, the Victorian past is not merely a nostalgic "strange country", but serves as a Sublime History we always push forward, seeking for the real "Truth", paradoxically with a clear self-awareness that "Truth" can never be reached. Therefore, I argue nostalgic homage and revisionist subversion coexist in Neo-Victorian Novel. Thus it can be regarded as the composite novel of its epoch. It demonstrates a complicated narrative aesthetics by highlighting the cannibalizing, ever-broader, all-encompassing nature of the novel; meanwhile it fully betrays the ambiguous, controversial, oxymoronic nature of postmodernism.