Abstract
In 1918 Ezra Pound coined the term ‘Victoriana’ as a way of pejoratively characterising the Victorian past: ‘For most of us, the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant … that we are content to leave the past where we find it’ (cited in Gardiner, 2004: 168). In stark contrast to Pound’s confident marginalisation of the Victorian past at the outset of the twentieth century, a steady interest in things Victorian gained momentum in the second half of the same century until, in the final decades, a fascination with the period invaded film, television, trends in interior decoration, fashion, genealogy, advertising, museums, histori-cal re-enactments, politics and scholarship about the Victorian period. Far from an unpleasant odour detected and quickly left behind, the literature and culture of the Victorian period have been courted, sought and summoned across many facets of contemporary culture for more than three decades. If we are indeed invaded by Victoriana, we welcome the incursion and insist upon it. The sense of reiteration, of repetition and re-assertion that characterises our fascination with the Victorians is captured in the epigraph above: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’ (Jensen, 1998: 165).
I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana.
(Liz Jensen, Ark Baby, 1998)
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© 2010 Kate Mitchell
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Mitchell, K. (2010). Introduction: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’. In: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_1
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