Content area
Full text
CHRISTENSEN, ALLAN CONRAD. The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 258 pp. $49.50.
The impressive range of critical essays in this new collection reflects the notable diversity that characterized the life and work of Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873). A scholar and an aristocrat, a liberal turned conservative, a defiant son and less than doting husband, a translator of both ancient and contemporary culture, Bulwer produced bildungsromane, fashionable novels, silver-fork fictions, historical romances, novels of social criticism, narratives of mysticism and the occult, science fictions, and imperial gothic tales-not to mention journalism, history, poetry, and drama. What ties these various psychological, political, and textual identities together is, according to Allen Christensen, "repeated patterns of antitheses or subversion" (9). In his introduction to the volume, Christensen argues that a certain "subverting vision" paradoxically produced "a unifying coherence [that] informs Bulwer's whole career" (9). Ultimately, one must question whether this somewhat reductive theme of subversion actually reveals a consistency of vision within Bulwer's works and days, whether it necessarily provides the most satisfying rubric for these conference proceedings, especially considering the term's imprecision and resulting ambiguity. However, these essays do provide valiant rebuffs against what might be considered the overarching antithesis of Bulwer's career: the posthumous eclipse of his living celebrity.
Andrew Brown's essay appropriately begins with a look at how the precipitous decline in Bulwer's literary reputation can be measured against both his meteoric rise and his contemporaries' relative equanimity of status. Admirers like Margaret Oliphant and Letitia Landon cheered Bulwer as greater than Scott or Dickens, yet detractors like the young Thackeray called him...