They have been critically and popularly acclaimed, added to university reading lists and adapted for television. All three novels are examples of lesbian fiction, but they are also arguably works of historiographic metafiction and “post-Victorian” novels. Since 1998, Waters has published three books set in the mid-to-late Victorian era, featuring lesbian protagonists: Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith. This masters thesis analyses the work of British writer Sarah Waters, focussing on the inseparability of spatiality and the expression of sexuality in her novels. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and mnemonic function today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction’s contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century.
Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians’ own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today.
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge.
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