The article examines Sarah Waters’s fiction in relation to the currently fashionable genre of ‘neo-Victorian’ or ‘post-Victorian’ literature. By detecting recurrent paradigms and discursive threads in Waters’s first three novels (1998-2002), Mariaconcetta Costantini investigates the effects of the historical method developed by the British novelist, who unearths and gives fictional shape to the silenced histories of the Victorian marginalised (i.e. women, homosexuals, criminals). The political energy with which Waters’s novels are imbued marks the specificity of her writing, which is neither costume melodrama nor purely postmodern metafiction. In the light of ideas developed by contemporary theorists (Hutcheon, Foucault, Belsey, etc.), Costantini proves that Waters’s neo-Victorianism has a twofold ideological scope: it explores the inequalities of a society that denied a voice to the ex-centric and invites comparisons with our age by reconstructing the cultural context in which many present discourses have their roots.
"Faux-Victorian Melodrama" in the New Millennium: The Case of Sarah Waters
COSTANTINI, Mariaconcetta
2006-01-01
Abstract
The article examines Sarah Waters’s fiction in relation to the currently fashionable genre of ‘neo-Victorian’ or ‘post-Victorian’ literature. By detecting recurrent paradigms and discursive threads in Waters’s first three novels (1998-2002), Mariaconcetta Costantini investigates the effects of the historical method developed by the British novelist, who unearths and gives fictional shape to the silenced histories of the Victorian marginalised (i.e. women, homosexuals, criminals). The political energy with which Waters’s novels are imbued marks the specificity of her writing, which is neither costume melodrama nor purely postmodern metafiction. In the light of ideas developed by contemporary theorists (Hutcheon, Foucault, Belsey, etc.), Costantini proves that Waters’s neo-Victorianism has a twofold ideological scope: it explores the inequalities of a society that denied a voice to the ex-centric and invites comparisons with our age by reconstructing the cultural context in which many present discourses have their roots.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
