• historical novel
• Julian Barnes
• neo-Victorianism
• Sarah Waters

The last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first witnessed a remarkable increase of novels with a direct or indirect connection to the Victorian era. The proliferation of what has come to be known as ‘neo-Victorian Fiction’ shows no sign of decline, as the consequent arise of scholarly research demonstrates.
Aim of this thesis is to offer an overview of the neo-Victorian phenomenon and to analyze some of the novels written in the period in question.
The first chapter provides a theoretical background for the neo-Victorian novel. Particular attention is paid to the connotative and denotative meanings attached to the term ‘Victorian’, as well as to the two different approaches towards the Victorian era which developed during the second half of the twentieth century. Given the plurality of interpretations and the abundance of terms coined, an attempt at definition of these contemporary rewritings is therefore offered.
Neo-Victorian novel reveal a profound engagement with history and the historical specificity of the Victorian era and, for this reason, may be considered historical novels in all respects. The second chapter thus traces the history of the historical novel, from the late eighteen century to the present, exploring how the relationship between history and fiction has been constructed, and how this has influenced the development of both the discipline of historiography and the historical novel, and, consequently, the neo-Victorian novel.
The third chapter provides a brief excursus into the neo-Victorian novels’ main features in order to show how these texts engage with Victorian canonical literary conventions. The chapter also acknowledges and examines the importance of two key twentieth-century novels – John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) – which suggest thematic areas of interest and anticipate many of the literary devices that later neo-Victorian novels will adopt and adapt to their aims.
The fourth chapter discusses Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) and analyses how the author exploits the conventions of Gothic and sensation fiction to address contemporary issues that she personally feels strongly about, like the creation of a history of nineteenth-century female homosexuality. In particular, Waters uses the theme of spiritualism as a metaphor of lesbian sexuality and as a space to explore the relationship between the present and the past and between fact and fiction.
Finally, the fifth chapter turns to Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005) which adopts the conventions of the nineteenth-century detective novel and evokes the figure of the most famous of all literary detectives, Sherlock Holmes. In examining the idea of ‘evidence’, crucial to both criminal detection and spiritualist investigation, the chapter analyses how Barnes’s novel explores issues surrounding historical narratives, issues to do with the possibility of accessing and knowing the past.