Abstract
‘The history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it’, or so Lytton Strachey declared in the preface to his book Eminent Victorians in 1918 (p. 10). Yet since the death of Queen Victoria more than 100 years ago, the history of the Victorian era has been continuously rewritten. Indeed, Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was itself part of a Modernist rewriting that reflected an oedipal desire to emphasize the distance between the Victorians and the Modernists. As J. B. Bullen writes, ‘For [Strachey], and for many of [his] contemporaries, “Victorian” was a way of distinguishing [his] own attitudes from those of [his] parents’ (p. 2). Bullen recognizes that ‘Victorian’ here is a connotative, rather than merely denotative, term; what the Modernists sought to distance themselves from were the systems of ‘repression, realism, materialism, and laissez-faire capitalism’ that they felt characterized the Victorian period (p. 2). Confirming the oedipal nature of this relationship, Bullen suggests that the Modernist drive to assert difference from the Victorian generation was ‘so strident that it now seems […] like the nursery tantrums of children rebelling against the despotic regime of their parents’ (p. 2).
Keywords
- Nineteenth Century
- Historical Narrative
- Historical Specificity
- Historical Fiction
- Biographical Narrative
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Copyright information
© 2010 Louisa Hadley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hadley, L. (2010). Introduction: Writing the Victorians. In: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230317499_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230317499_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36248-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-31749-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)