Document Type
Journal Article
Department/Unit
Department of English Language and Literature
Language
English
Abstract
Neo-Victorian novelists sometimes use postgraduate students – trainee academics – who research nineteenth-century writers as protagonists. This article discusses four neo-Victorian novels, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), Justine Picardie’s Daphne (2008), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005) and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006), in which female postgraduate students take the centre stage. In Victorian literature, which mirrors the gender bias in the academic world and in society at large at that time, most scholars are male. The contemporary writers’ choice of female trainee academics is worth investigating as it speaks to the visibly changed gender make-up of contemporary academia. However, this utopian situation is complicated by the fact that the writers have chosen to frustrate the characters’ entry into the world of scholarship by having them leave the university environment altogether before the end of the novel. The fact that these females all choose to depart the university forms a contrast with notions of the university found in Victorian novels, in which leaving or not attending university might have detrimental effects on the characters.
Keywords
Neo-Victorian fiction, literary adaptations, gender, intellectual cannibalism, trainee academics, fiction vs literary criticism, Lloyd Jones, Justine Picardie, A.N. Wilson, Scarlett Thomas
Publication Date
2016
Source Publication Title
American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
Volume
26
Issue
1
Start Page
72
End Page
86
Publisher
De Gruyter Open
Peer Reviewed
1
DOI
10.1515/abcsj-2016-0005
Link to Publisher's Edition
https://doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2016-0005
ISSN (print)
18411487
APA Citation
Ho, T. (2016). Female researchers in neo-Victorian fiction. American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, 26 (1). https://doi.org/10.1515/abcsj-2016-0005