Dancing with the Victorians in a Postmodern World
Location
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
18-9-2018 10:00 AM
Description
This presentation discusses the ways in which John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A. S. Byatt in Possession (1990), and Jeffrey Eugenides in The Marriage Plot (2011) revisit and rewrite nineteenth-century literary history. It examines how these writers use postmodern and contemporary tropes to explore the ways in which our cultural history mirrors and shapes our present lives and futures. This talk also draws from Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014), a heavily researched personal memoir that details the growth of an individual in relation to the Victorian novel Middlemarch, which was, is, and continues to be a profoundly influential text in her life. Ultimately, the presentation argues that, as a people, we can better chart meaningful futures when we understand the ways in which our current lives and cultures are consonant with and distinct from our past—and that this understanding is deepened through postmodernism, which deliberately distorts the cultural mirrors, de-familiarizing and heightening the past as well as the present.
Recommended Citation
Sisson, Annette PhD, "Dancing with the Victorians in a Postmodern World" (2018). Humanities Symposium. 29.
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium/2018/2018/29
Dancing with the Victorians in a Postmodern World
Janet Ayers Academic Center, JAAC 4094
This presentation discusses the ways in which John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), A. S. Byatt in Possession (1990), and Jeffrey Eugenides in The Marriage Plot (2011) revisit and rewrite nineteenth-century literary history. It examines how these writers use postmodern and contemporary tropes to explore the ways in which our cultural history mirrors and shapes our present lives and futures. This talk also draws from Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014), a heavily researched personal memoir that details the growth of an individual in relation to the Victorian novel Middlemarch, which was, is, and continues to be a profoundly influential text in her life. Ultimately, the presentation argues that, as a people, we can better chart meaningful futures when we understand the ways in which our current lives and cultures are consonant with and distinct from our past—and that this understanding is deepened through postmodernism, which deliberately distorts the cultural mirrors, de-familiarizing and heightening the past as well as the present.
Comments
Convocation Credit: Society and the Arts and Sciences