1st Edition
Neo-Georgian Fiction Reimagining the Eighteenth Century in the Contemporary Historical Novel
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.
Introduction: Defining the Neo-Georgian
Jakub Lipski and Joanna Maciulewicz
- Peter Ackroyd’s Neo-Georgian Fiction: Reconstructing "the Age of Disguise"
- Defoe’s Foes: The Author as Character
- Beyond Terracentric History: The Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade in Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger
- "Whose pictur’d Morals charm the Mind / And through the Eye correct the Heart": Re-writing the Pictorial Narrative of A Harlot’s Progress
- The Blind Man and the Rainbow: Vicarious Experience and Libertinism in The Skull and the Nightingale
- Renarrating Women’s Stories in Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
Jakub Lipski
Daniel Cook
Przemysław Uściński
M-C. Newbould
Tymon Adamczewski
Joanna Maciulewicz
Biography
Jakub Lipski is Associate Professor of Anglophone Literatures at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. His research interests include eighteenth-century English fiction and culture, the correspondences between word and image, and reception and adaptation studies. He is the author of In Quest of the Self: Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2014), Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (2018) and editor of Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media (2020).
Joanna Maciulewicz is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. She is the author of Representations of Book Culture in Eighteenth-Century English Imaginative Writing (2018). Her research interests focus on eighteenth-century literature and culture, the history of the book and the theory of early English, Spanish and Polish fiction. She is an assistant editor of Studia Anglica Posnaniensia.
