RT Conference Proceedings
T1 Distinguishing neo-Edwardianism from neo-Victorianism
A1 Cruz-Rus, Celia
K1 Literatura inglesa - 1901-1914
AB Ever since the 1930s, with Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930), representations ofthe Edwardian period can be found in British fiction. However, those have evolved throughout theyears, as neo-Edwardian novels seem to incorporate postmodern ideas and share more featureswith neo-Victorian fiction than with their rather conservative predecessors. Furthermore, some ofthese novels, in which the crucial parts of the action take place in the Edwardian era, start in theVictorian period.Aligned with current debates in historiography about periodization of the late nineteenth -early twentieth century, this paper aims to add a new point of view by analysing recentrepresentations of the Edwardians in contemporary fiction through a close analysis of novels thatcould be called neo-Edwardian and show ways in which they collide with and differ fromrepresentations of the Victorians, as it is the case with Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005) andTracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) among others.In order to do so, it will be necessary to revisit Linda Hutcheon’s theories aboutpostmodern historical fiction found in her Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and reach recent criticaltrends like the ones appearing in Nicola Parsons and Kate Mitchell’s Reading Historical Fiction: TheRevenant and Remembered Past (2013), which show an evolution away from historiographicmetafiction. Also, the definition of neo-Victorianism provided by Ann Heilmann and MarkLlewelyn in Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2005 (2010) will beessential to articulate this paper.Out of this exploration, the question whether neo-Edwardian novels talk about the twentyfirstcentury in spite of their setting will arise too, re-opening the discussion on nostalgia initiated inthe 1980s.As a result, it will be shown that, although the relationship between neo-Edwardian fictionand neo-Victorianism is close, the former can be interpreted as a different subgenre with quite anambivalent attitude towards the past, ranging from nostalgia to an anti-nostalgic impulse.
YR 2014
FD 2014-12-01
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10630/8505
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10630/8505
LA eng
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 22 ene 2026