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Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss (eds), Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. New York and London: Routledge, 2014, pp.vi + 235. Hardback $140.00, ISBN 978-0-415-70830-2.
This collection of essays presents itself as a timely evaluation of 'the methods and approaches' of the fast-growing field of neo-Victorian studies (p.2). Alongside Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss's editorial introduction, Marie-Luise Kohlke's opening essay raises key questions about how we define, value and choose neo-Victorian texts, and she warns that it is too early in the development of neo-Victorian studies to draw strict generic boundaries that risk 'the oversight of literary "buried treasures"' (Kohlke, p.21). Kohlke recommends using 'neo-Victorian' as an 'umbrella term to encompass virtually all historical fiction related to the nineteenth century' (p.27). Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn's Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (2010) and their more prescriptive understanding of neo-Victorianism 'as strongly emphasising the metafictional strategies and self-reflexivity of the discipline' is set up as a foil to this broad interpretation and to the present volume's assertion that neo-Victorian studies is moving beyond postmodernism and requires 'new tools of analysis' (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss, p.2).
Some of these new critical strategies are demonstrated in the first of the collection's four sections. The essays (which include Kohlke's) assert that neo-Victorianists need to rethink their approach to texts which invite affective, immersive and nostalgic reading experiences (and are therefore associated with naïve and unselfconscious reading practices). Rosa Karl, for example, argues that 'nostalgia [...] propels our identity work' (p.47) and cleverly shows that a consideration of immersion does not have to be an uncritical one in her discussion of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair (2001), a novel which literalises immersive reading when the protagonist is drawn into the world of Jane Eyre (itself a work which has been loved and belittled for its immersive qualities since its...