Description
Book SynopsisSimon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.
Trade Review“Joyce offers a fascinating range of case studies of writers, film-makers and politicians who have appropriated the culture and ideas of the nineteenth century in the wake of English Modernism.... A rich work that suggests why those eminent Victorians remain so immanent.” * The Times Literary Supplement *
“(Joyce) is not interpreting the Victorian period directly, nor in the various ways that Victorian texts have been reconceptualized, but is instead unpacking the various meanings of ‘the Victorian’ over the past hundred years. The result is a book…that urgently speaks to the study and profession of Victorian literature, history, and culture today.” * Victorian Studies *
“(Joyce’s) main argument is that the (often pejorative) definitions assigned by the modernists of the Bloomsbury circle to ‘Victorian’ and ‘Victorianism’ have tended to persist, thereby obscuring the more progressive aspects of 19th-century thought—for example, classical liberalism.” * CHOICE *
“Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is a good example of academic training put to use in a manner that both contributes to fresh scholarly understanding and at the same time engages in lively and socially useful polemic. The book is so animated because while it has a lot to say about the Victorian period, it’s really about how the period has served and continues to serve as the object of competing urgencies, political and cultural.” * author ofFeeling Global: Internationalism in Distress *
