Introduction

Abstract

Neo-Victorianism, or ‘retro-Victorianism’, to use Gutleben’s (2001) term, has, in recent years, emerged as a thriving and influential field of art and literature as well as an academic study engaging with similar concerns. Neo-Victorian literature, for instance, as fiction about the Victorian age rather than of the Victorian age, plays with and explores its own distance from its object of scrutiny. As critics such as Heilmann and Llewellyn (2010) and Kaplan (2007) have established, neo-Victorianism is an endeavour that explores the historiography of the Victorian age in a retrospective and revisionist fashion. Thus, through often self-reflexive and metafictional engagement with the processes of accessing history, neo-Victorianism asks questions concerning the fictionalisation of the past and its situatedness vis-à-vis the present. In neo-Victorian fiction this allows authors to construct images of the period that are often created out of the silences and omissions of the Victorian text and out of pieced-together fragments. Even while these stories are at times intensely personal in the way they explore the secrets of the period to form an image which offers an alternative to ‘official’ versions of Victoriana,¹ they also rely on knowledge provided by academic research and often encourage an element of scientific detachment.