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NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2012

Margaret D. Stetz
Margaret D. Stetz*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Extract

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit (1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense in Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century (2010), where John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

Type
Review Essays
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 339 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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