Kate Mitchell | The Australian National University (original) (raw)
Books by Kate Mitchell
A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 2024
This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual acc... more This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual accounts of Madame X the historical figure, to examine hybrid life-writing genres’ possibilities and limitations in recapturing the nineteenth-century past. Our texts are Gioia Diliberto’s biographical novel I am Madame X (2003), and Deborah Davis’s creative non-fiction Strapless (2003). Their authorial attempts to restore the enigmatic woman in the painting to cultural memory – particularly in the absence of substantial archival evidence – illuminates the collision of history, fiction, art and narrative, thus providing a framework to interrogate biofiction and the politics of memory.
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiogra... more History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians’ own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction’s contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and mnemonic function today.
Articles and Chapters by Kate Mitchell
College Literature 48:4, 2021
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occ... more This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
Lisa Lang’s award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010) reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous... more Lisa Lang’s award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010) reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous Book Arcade in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running in its central Melbourne location from 1883-1929, in popular discourses Cole’s Book Arcade was, and is, synonymous with nineteenth-century Melbourne itself; its vibrant, eclectic atmosphere seemed to capture the essence of the booming nineteenth-century metropolis. In Lang’s biofiction, the Arcade becomes a lens through which to view Melbourne itself. Cole is sympathetically drawn and his characteristics – his eccentricities, entrepreneurism, philanthropy and idealism – provide a critical contrast with a city increasingly suspicious toward immigrants, as Australia moves toward federation, and toward establishing the White Australia policy. While it is set entirely in the past, the novel’s structural nostalgia – the Arcade and its values are always already lost in this narrative – speaks to a present in which Australia is once again closing its borders. The novel positions itself as witness to Australia’s lost alternative of a tolerant society, one that embraced other views and welcomed a range of immigrants, and which exists today only as memory.
Victoriographies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 259-279., 2019
Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde were fascinat... more Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present?
Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within complex relationships: to the narrative in which the paintings are embedded, which can only tell, and not show the painting’s power; to the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds them, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and to the past, whose relationship to the present they both manifest and construct. This article explores the use of art in this novel to reflect on the availability of the past in the present, as well as on neo-Victorianism itself, with its power to critique and rework the past, but also to fascinate in the present. Ultimately, the novel captures not the power of art to access past lives, but a disconcerting vision of ourselves, caught in the act of (obsessive) re-representation.
Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics. Eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 2015
This article discusses the representation of colonial Melbourne in Robyn Annear’s creative nonfic... more This article discusses the representation of colonial Melbourne in Robyn Annear’s creative nonfiction, Bearbrass (1995), and A.L. McCann’s novel, The White Body of Evening (2002). It suggests that their depictions of the city are drawn from the material traces still visible in vestigial form today, and from previous representations of the nineteenth–century city, drawing on literary images not only of Melbourne itself, but also of London, particularly as it is represented in neo-Victorian fiction. It argues that these two, contrasting, evocations of Melbourne’s past suggest the ways in which neo-Victorian representations of the colonial city construct it as doubly palimpsestic: inscribed upon it are not only the vestigial remains of its own past shape but traces, too, of the grand European city it was built to imitate. The Australian city of Melbourne is a particularly evocative example since from the planning of the nineteenth-century city to its literary productions, there is a way in which it is always, already, neo-Victorian.
Keywords: Australian gothic, Robyn Annear, Bearbrass, colonial city, colonial Melbourne, imagined city, A.L McCann, neo-Victorian; palimpsest, The White Body of Evening.
Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 2013
The generic status of Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) is uncertain, but it is clear from the openi... more The generic status of Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) is uncertain, but it is clear from the opening pages that the author conceptualizes her project as an act of memory: it is an attempt to document a past that ended abruptly in 1989 with the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and which, she perceives, many are eager to forget. As an Australian writer revisiting German history, she thus attempts to recuperate a past that does not ‘belong’ to her. But how can one remember a past that is not one’s own? Can we presume to speak on another nation’s behalf, to imagine another country’s traumatic history? And how might ‘creative nonfiction’ perform cultural memory in this way? This article examines Stasiland’s status as an example of Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004), which fosters an affective connection to a mediated foreign past. I argue that in Stasiland, Funder deploys a range of literary strategies to make the past both comprehensible and memorable for her foreign readers, creating a community of memory across borders.
Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between hist... more Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between history, memory and fiction as modes of recollection. Employing a lexicon of haunting and spectrality, these novels are concerned with recognising the persistence of the past in a present cut off from linear models of inheritance and memory. Extending and elaborating influential theoretical models of contemporary historical fiction, these novels deploy the ghostly figure of photography in order to posit the persistence of the past as uncanny repetition and as embodied memory. The article closes by considering the implications of these historical fictions as “memory texts,” arguing that they are not, primarily, concerned with metafictional or metahistorical reflections but rather write the period into our cultural memory, offering themselves as the uncanny repetition of the “body” of Victorian culture persisting in the here and now.
Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Abori... more Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Aboriginal dispossession and destruction upon which Australia is founded, situating its reader complexly, as both witness to and complicit in the events it retells. Her use of fiction to represent this trauma made Grenville the focus of heated public debate about the role of fiction in representing the past, a debate that repeatedly cast her project as historically dubious. However, rather than approaching the novel as a corrupted form of history’s reconstruction of past events, it seems more useful to situate this text as an act of memory in the present, which shapes both past and future. Even as it represents the past, Grenville’s novel addresses a present both deeply divided and in danger of forgetting its history. It uses the affective power of fiction to reinscribe and reactivate Aboriginal Australian history in the contemporary historical imaginary.
epress.anu.edu.au
This issue of Humanities Research had its genesis in the European Diaspora Research Network, an i... more This issue of Humanities Research had its genesis in the European Diaspora Research Network, an initiative of the National Europe Centre at The Australian National University and Victoria University in Melbourne. [1] The network was founded with the aim of connecting ...
Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, Jan 1, 2011
ABSTRACT
Special Issues by Kate Mitchell
Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and ... more Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and Germany' of Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture
Papers by Kate Mitchell
The European Legacy, 2012
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. By Kate Mitchell (Ha... more History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. By Kate Mitchell (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ix + 222 pp. £50.00 cloth. According to Kate Mitchell there ...
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 2013
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, 2010
College Literature, 2021
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occ... more This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 2024
This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual acc... more This article situates John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1884) alongside two textual accounts of Madame X the historical figure, to examine hybrid life-writing genres’ possibilities and limitations in recapturing the nineteenth-century past. Our texts are Gioia Diliberto’s biographical novel I am Madame X (2003), and Deborah Davis’s creative non-fiction Strapless (2003). Their authorial attempts to restore the enigmatic woman in the painting to cultural memory – particularly in the absence of substantial archival evidence – illuminates the collision of history, fiction, art and narrative, thus providing a framework to interrogate biofiction and the politics of memory.
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiogra... more History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians’ own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction’s contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways of thinking about contemporary historical fiction and its prevalence, popular appeal, and mnemonic function today.
College Literature 48:4, 2021
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occ... more This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
Lisa Lang’s award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010) reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous... more Lisa Lang’s award-winning Australian novel Utopian Man (2010) reimagines E.W. Cole and his famous Book Arcade in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running in its central Melbourne location from 1883-1929, in popular discourses Cole’s Book Arcade was, and is, synonymous with nineteenth-century Melbourne itself; its vibrant, eclectic atmosphere seemed to capture the essence of the booming nineteenth-century metropolis. In Lang’s biofiction, the Arcade becomes a lens through which to view Melbourne itself. Cole is sympathetically drawn and his characteristics – his eccentricities, entrepreneurism, philanthropy and idealism – provide a critical contrast with a city increasingly suspicious toward immigrants, as Australia moves toward federation, and toward establishing the White Australia policy. While it is set entirely in the past, the novel’s structural nostalgia – the Arcade and its values are always already lost in this narrative – speaks to a present in which Australia is once again closing its borders. The novel positions itself as witness to Australia’s lost alternative of a tolerant society, one that embraced other views and welcomed a range of immigrants, and which exists today only as memory.
Victoriographies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 259-279., 2019
Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde were fascinat... more Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present?
Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within complex relationships: to the narrative in which the paintings are embedded, which can only tell, and not show the painting’s power; to the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds them, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and to the past, whose relationship to the present they both manifest and construct. This article explores the use of art in this novel to reflect on the availability of the past in the present, as well as on neo-Victorianism itself, with its power to critique and rework the past, but also to fascinate in the present. Ultimately, the novel captures not the power of art to access past lives, but a disconcerting vision of ourselves, caught in the act of (obsessive) re-representation.
Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics. Eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 2015
This article discusses the representation of colonial Melbourne in Robyn Annear’s creative nonfic... more This article discusses the representation of colonial Melbourne in Robyn Annear’s creative nonfiction, Bearbrass (1995), and A.L. McCann’s novel, The White Body of Evening (2002). It suggests that their depictions of the city are drawn from the material traces still visible in vestigial form today, and from previous representations of the nineteenth–century city, drawing on literary images not only of Melbourne itself, but also of London, particularly as it is represented in neo-Victorian fiction. It argues that these two, contrasting, evocations of Melbourne’s past suggest the ways in which neo-Victorian representations of the colonial city construct it as doubly palimpsestic: inscribed upon it are not only the vestigial remains of its own past shape but traces, too, of the grand European city it was built to imitate. The Australian city of Melbourne is a particularly evocative example since from the planning of the nineteenth-century city to its literary productions, there is a way in which it is always, already, neo-Victorian.
Keywords: Australian gothic, Robyn Annear, Bearbrass, colonial city, colonial Melbourne, imagined city, A.L McCann, neo-Victorian; palimpsest, The White Body of Evening.
Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 2013
The generic status of Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) is uncertain, but it is clear from the openi... more The generic status of Anna Funder’s Stasiland (2002) is uncertain, but it is clear from the opening pages that the author conceptualizes her project as an act of memory: it is an attempt to document a past that ended abruptly in 1989 with the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and which, she perceives, many are eager to forget. As an Australian writer revisiting German history, she thus attempts to recuperate a past that does not ‘belong’ to her. But how can one remember a past that is not one’s own? Can we presume to speak on another nation’s behalf, to imagine another country’s traumatic history? And how might ‘creative nonfiction’ perform cultural memory in this way? This article examines Stasiland’s status as an example of Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004), which fosters an affective connection to a mediated foreign past. I argue that in Stasiland, Funder deploys a range of literary strategies to make the past both comprehensible and memorable for her foreign readers, creating a community of memory across borders.
Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between hist... more Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between history, memory and fiction as modes of recollection. Employing a lexicon of haunting and spectrality, these novels are concerned with recognising the persistence of the past in a present cut off from linear models of inheritance and memory. Extending and elaborating influential theoretical models of contemporary historical fiction, these novels deploy the ghostly figure of photography in order to posit the persistence of the past as uncanny repetition and as embodied memory. The article closes by considering the implications of these historical fictions as “memory texts,” arguing that they are not, primarily, concerned with metafictional or metahistorical reflections but rather write the period into our cultural memory, offering themselves as the uncanny repetition of the “body” of Victorian culture persisting in the here and now.
Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Abori... more Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Aboriginal dispossession and destruction upon which Australia is founded, situating its reader complexly, as both witness to and complicit in the events it retells. Her use of fiction to represent this trauma made Grenville the focus of heated public debate about the role of fiction in representing the past, a debate that repeatedly cast her project as historically dubious. However, rather than approaching the novel as a corrupted form of history’s reconstruction of past events, it seems more useful to situate this text as an act of memory in the present, which shapes both past and future. Even as it represents the past, Grenville’s novel addresses a present both deeply divided and in danger of forgetting its history. It uses the affective power of fiction to reinscribe and reactivate Aboriginal Australian history in the contemporary historical imaginary.
epress.anu.edu.au
This issue of Humanities Research had its genesis in the European Diaspora Research Network, an i... more This issue of Humanities Research had its genesis in the European Diaspora Research Network, an initiative of the National Europe Centre at The Australian National University and Victoria University in Melbourne. [1] The network was founded with the aim of connecting ...
Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, Jan 1, 2011
ABSTRACT
Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and ... more Introduction to Special Issue entitled 'Entangled Past: Transnational Memories in Australia and Germany' of Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture
The European Legacy, 2012
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. By Kate Mitchell (Ha... more History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. By Kate Mitchell (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ix + 222 pp. £50.00 cloth. According to Kate Mitchell there ...
Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 2013
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, 2010
College Literature, 2021
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occ... more This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
Victoriographies
Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Oscar Wilde were fascina... more Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as a trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present? Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within a complex set of relationships, including the narrative in which the paintings are embedded and which can only tell, and not show, the painting's power; the artist who pa...
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiogra... more History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian fiction combines innovative literary and historiographical analysis to investigate the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and to analyse their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge. Positioning neo-Victorian novels as dynamic participants in the contemporary historical imaginary, it explores their use of the Victorians’ own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today. While her focus is neo-Victorian fiction, Mitchell positions these novels in relation to debates about historical fiction’s contribution to historical knowledge since the eighteenth century. Her use of memory discourse as a framework for understanding the ways in which they do lay claim to historical recollection, one which opens up a range of questions beyond historical fidelity on the one hand, and the problematics of representation on the other, suggests new ways ...
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction, 2010