Neo-Georgian Fiction: Reimagining the Eighteenth Century in the Contemporary Historical Novel (Routledge Focus on Literature)

"This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies by analysing neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, has so far received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection study the ways in which the selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels recreate the Georgian period in order to view its ideologies through the lens of such modern critical theories as performativity, post-colonialism, feminism or visual theories. They also demonstrate the rich repertoire of subgenres of neo-Georgian fiction, ranging from biographical fiction, epistolary novels to magical realism. The included studies of the diverse novelistic conventions used to re-contextualise the Georgian reality reflect the way we see its relevance and relation to the present and trace the indebtedness of the new forms of the contemporary novel to the traditional novelistic genres"-- Provided by publisher This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies with new analyses of neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, until now has received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection s Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Information 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Illustrations 8 Contributors 9 Introduction: Delineating the Neo-Georgian 12 Notes 18 1 Peter Ackroyd’s Neo-Georgian Fiction: Reconstructing “the Age of Disguise” 21 Stories of Frauds 23 Masquerade Poetics 26 Discourse of the Self 28 Notes 32 2 Defoe’s Foes: The Author As Character 34 Coetzee’s Foe; Or, Who Is the Author? 36 Dear Mr Foe 39 Travels With Defoe 43 Notes 48 3 Beyond Terracentric History: The Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger 51 Notes 68 4 “whose Pictur’d Morals Charm the Mind / And Through the Eye Correct the Heart”1: Rewriting the Pictorial Narrative of A Harlot’s Progress 72 Rereading the Harlot’s Story 74 Rewriting the Harlot’s Story 78 Notes 88 5 The Blind Man and the Rainbow: Vicarious Experience and Libertinism in The Skull and the Nightingale 91 Vicarious Pleasures 93 A Blind Man’s Rainbow 99 Conclusion 104 Notes 105 6 Renarrating Women’s Stories: Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock 108 Notes 123 Bibliography 126 Index 137 Klappentext: "This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies by analysing neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, has so far received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection study the ways in which the selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels recreate the Georgian period in order to view its ideologies through the lens of such modern critical theories as performativity, post-colonialism, feminism or visual theories. They also demonstrate the rich repertoire of subgenres of neo-Georgian fiction, ranging from biographical fiction, epistolary novels to magical realism. The included studies of the diverse novelistic conventions used to re-contextualise the Georgian reality reflect the way we see its relevance and relation to the present and trace the indebtedness of the new forms of the contemporary novel to the traditional novelistic genres"