The Heterosis of the Anglophone Neo-Victorian Novel in the New Millennium

Abstract

This work inscribes itself as part of a more encompassing research project about the neo-Victorian which purports to inquire into the functions of the categories of subversion and nostalgia in a corpus of millennial Anglophone neo-Victorian novels. This presentation approaches one representative text – The Dark Clue (2001) by James Wilson – which displays a particular oxymoronic fusion: nostalgic returns to certain narrative strategies of Victorian writing and the use of metafictional strategies which, however, abstain from both pyrotechnic self-reflexive experimentation and short-circuiting of immersive reading experiences. The work postulates a new double coding whereby the category of novel analyzed represents a search for neomorphic possibilities in the face of the exhaustion of the metafictional features most closely associated with a postmodernist poetics, and therefore, part of a style of culture – known as postmodernism – but without failing to subscribe to a thematic agenda that responds to a postmodern style of thought – or postmodernity, according to Terry Eagleton’s distinction.