"Adaptation" or "Appropriation": Re-narrating the Victorian Past as an Ethical Decision

Abstract

In the postmodern era, Kevin OʼDonnell positions, "[o]ur generation is more ironically self-aware than any previous one. We realize that we are children of our time, and we play with ideas and styles from other eras quite deliberately." Hence, the progressing Victorian revival accentuates the modern "play with the past" but also, first and foremost, manifests the validity of historical recollection in the present-day era. While postmodernism conflicts with the idea of the central, unified historical narrative, it celebrates "non-linear, expressive and supra-rational discourses." Therefore, the resurrected interest in the Victorian era introduces into the post-Victorian landscape the so-far marginalized or obliterated nineteenth-century narratives. While concentrating on the literary dimension of the neo-Victorian phenomena, I present the multifaceted approaches to narrating the Victorian past. Thus, in my paper, I strive to account for the difference between the terms: "adaptation" and "appropriation" of the literary past. Simultaneously, I offer an alternative term: domestication of the past. Likewise, I investigate into the reasons for re-introducing the nineteenth-century into the modern consciousness. On the whole, my paper examines the neoVictorian literary phenomena as an ethical, deliberate and conscious choice to retell the past anew. What such a revival entails is not only the possibility of approximating the past to the current frame of socio-cultural reference, but also the hazard of reducing the Victorian era to a mere nostalgia. Moreover, as I strive to present, the so-called "Victorian values" are often turned into an umbrellaterm for an ideologised rhetoric, while "Victorian nostalgia" serves as a pretext for writing innumerable neo-Victorian "bestsellers." Hence, I examine the process of "commodification" of the past in the postmodern era. My research is based on such critical works as: Heidi Hanssonʼs Romance Revived: Postmodern Romances and the Tradition, Louisa Hadleyʼs Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us or Ann Heilmann and Mark Lewellynʼs Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009. Moreover, I discuss the techniques of reviving the Victorian past in the works of such modern writers as Syrie James and James Wilson.