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History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Kate Mitchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. ix+222. $80.00/^50.00. (Hardcover).
Kate Mitchell's monograph seeks to move away from traditional approaches to contemporary historical fiction, which have focused on the ways that such fiction highlights the impossibility of ever attaining legitimate historical knowledge. To do this, Mitchell has chosen a series of novels that stylistically or thematically engage with the Victorian era. These novels are: Graham Swift's Waterland (1983); A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance (1990); Sarah Waters' Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002); Gail Jones' Sixty Lights (2004); and Helen Humphreys' Afterimage (2001). For Mitchell, these novels manifest an awareness of the difficulty of achieving genuine historical knowledge but nonetheless remain "committed to the possibility and the value of striving for that knowledge" (3). Further, Mitchell claims that these novels actually expand history by including non-textual modes of memory and retrieval i.e. "oral histories, geographies, cartographies, paintings, photographs and bodies" (7). Accordingly, rather than simply recollecting the past, these novels "re-embody... re-member, or reconstruct it" (7).
To illustrate her argument, Mitchell begins by tracing the ways in which the historical novel has been received over the course of time (specifically from the late eighteenth-century to the present). In tracing the reception of the historical novel, Mitchell focuses on the notion of 'memory texts'. The 'memory text' is a term coined by Gail Jones to describe her novel Sixty Lights (7). Mitchell identifies with this term because it provides more critical scope i.e. it gives readers the means to explore a variety of historical modes and questions. Added to this, it enables readers to create historical meaning (8). Mitchell then considers the ways in which the Victorian period has been used and represented in successive periods. In particular, Mitchell notes that in the twentieth-century, it was used as an 'other' through which modernity could establish its own identity while in the early twenty-first century, it has been used as a point of similarity where cultural critics have identified the origins of a number of contemporary cultural features in...