Victoriana

With her characteristic verve, honesty, and insight, Cora Kaplan shakes out simple nostalgia and received ideas through fresh, utterly absorbing, and entertaining readings of authors, artists, and filmmakers. Kaplan listens in to the past for its present resonances, and her Victorian voices sound vigorous, very close, and vividly engaged with the vexed questions of today-exclusion, maleness, beauty, and female sexual expression. -- Marina Warner, The University of Essex A thrilling and searching book exploring our contemporary fascination with the 'bulging archive' of recycled Victorian material and the contradictory sets of feelings, including Kaplan's own, that drive this compulsion. In her hands, this book becomes a new analytic category investigated with subtle theoretical insight and deep imaginative integrity, wit, and passion. -- Isobel Armstrong, University of London

Reflects on the obsession with Victorian culture. This book explores issues of class, gender, empire, and race as well as the pleasures and dangers of imitating or referencing narrative forms, individual histories, and belief systems.In Victoriana, leading feminist cultural critic Cora Kaplan reflects on our modern obsession with Victorian culture. She considers evocations of the nineteenth century in literature (The French Lieutenants' Woman by John Fowles, Possession by A. S. Byatt, Nice Work by David Lodge, The Master by Colm Toibin, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst), film (Jane Campion's The Piano), and biography (Peter Ackroyd's Dickens). Why, she asks, does Jane Eyre still evoke tears and rage from its readers, and why has Henry James become fiction's favorite late-Victorian author? Within Victoriana, Kaplan argues, lies a modern history of its own that reflects the shifting social and cultural concerns of the last few decades. Distance has lent a sense of antique charm and exoticism to even the worst abuses of the period, but it has also allowed innovative writers and filmmakers to use Victorian settings and language to develop a new and challenging aesthetic. Issues of class, gender, empire, and race are explored as well as the pleasures and dangers of imitating or referencing narrative forms, individual histories, and belief systems. As Kaplan makes clear, Victoriana can be seen as a striking example of historical imagination on the move, restless and unsettled.