‘Eminent Victorians’ and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography.

Taking her cue from the contemporary interest in both life-writing and Victorian individuals, Steveker focuses on the genre of neo-Victorian fictional biography. Providing close readings of Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009) and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2009), Steveker argues that these two novels not only undermine clichéd perceptions of the ‘eminent Victorians’ whose lives they depict, but also question the idealised image of the Victorian age as a period of confident humanism and individual self-respect. Making two Victorian authors return as neo-Victorian fictional characters, Foulds’s and Flanagan’s novels exemplify the desire of repetition which is symptomatic of the neo-Victorian project.