Browsing by Author "Vorndran, Truchen"

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    The afterlife of the Victorian marriage plot in neo-Victorian fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Vorndran, Truchen; Ellis, Jeanne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The neo-Victorian novel is known for exposing the hidden sex lives of what Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1964) and, following him, Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality (1984) describe as the “Other Victorians”, those marginal and sexually transgressive figures who now populate its pages. However, this has led to the neo-Victorian novel being criticised for its reconstruction of nineteenth-century history into a sexually explicit narrative for the enjoyment of a contemporary audience, or what Marie-Luise Kohkle in “The Neo-Victorian Sexsation: Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth-Century Erotic” refers to as “sexsation” (345). Neo-Victorian novels critically engage with the Victorian past and its narratives by employing either an historical, or partly historical setting. A number of recent novels which are not historical in their setting similarly respond to or engage with a particular Victorian novel or Victorian morals and values either explicitly or implicitly in this highly self-conscious, revisionary fashion. Examples of such novels are Here on Earth (1997) by Alice Hoffman, On Chesil Beach (2007) by Ian McEwan and Re Jane (2015) by Patricia Park. In this thesis, I undertake to read these novels as representative of a separate category of neo-Victorian fiction by focussing on the “afterlife” of the Victorian marriage plot in them, a term I take from John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff’s Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century.