Modern literature and education Literary modernism Postmodernism Feminist literature

Eclecticism is a conceptual approach that does not hold rigidly to a single paradigm or set of assumptions, but instead draws upon multiple theories, styles, or ideas to gain complementary insights into a subject, or applies different theories in particular cases. However, this is often without conventions or rules dictating how or which theories were combined.
It can sometimes seem inelegant or lacking in simplicity, and eclectics are sometimes criticized for lack of consistency in their thinking. It is, however, common in many fields of study. For example, most psychologists accept certain aspects of behaviorism, but do not attempt to use the theory to explain all aspects of human behavior.
As Walter Pater put it in his "Postscript" to Appreciations (1889), the nineteenth century has its style, and that style is "an eclectic one" (qtd. in Bolus-Reichert 240). This ambitious book by Christine Bolus-Reichert admirably demonstrates the truth of Pater's thesis, while offering a persuasive way of reassessing several huge and familiar issues—the burden of the past, the loss of faith, the rise of the middle classes, liberalism, capitalism—under a novel and comprehensive aegis. She aims to demonstrate that eclecticism is an aesthetic and critical category in the period; to contribute to the growing field of transnational Victorian studies, via the comparative approach that her topic suggests; and to "create a place for the Victorians in the genealogy of postmodernism" (3-4).
This comparative and interdisciplinary project especially brings art and architectural history to bear on Bolus-Reichert's central question, while selecting key moments in the history of philosophy as well. The book thus positions Victorian studies as a broader field and places it within a longer view. In fact, the book is divided almost in half between part one, "Toward an Age of Eclecticism," and part two, "Eclectic Victorians." The second half provides strong readings of Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, [End Page 531] Pater, and Thomas Hardy; but those readings are exemplary, and would not be fully resonant without the lengthy exploration of the prehistory of Victorian eclecticism. This brief list of "Eclectic Victorians" does not begin to suggest the incredibly rich range of texts and figures treated in the book, which could be seen as a densely textured synthesis of various ways of evaluating a synthetic tendency in nineteenth-century art and thought.
Derived from a Greek root meaning "to select," the term eclecticism was introduced into English in Henry Fuseli's 1765 translation of Johann Joachim Winckel-mann. Though acknowledging that the Victorians did not much use the term in any but a pejorative sense until the late nineteenth century, she nevertheless shows that the Victorians were deeply engaged with the idea of eclecticism. The signs are not far to seek, in museums and other practices of collection and display such as lecture series, anthologies, and exhibitions. She provides her readers with a complex genealogy for the term and concept—involving the work of Victor Cousin, important in nineteenth-century England and largely forgotten now, on the one hand, and, on the other, the history of critical responses to the Carracci and their academy in seventeenth-century Bologna. Some voices, from Winckelmann forward, take the Carracci as examples of eclectic art, while others dismiss the term; this debate has been formative in the history of the concept.
The term allows Bolus-Reichert to sketch a literary history of a sense of belatedness giving way to modernity over the course of the nineteenth century. According to Bolus-Reichert, the causes of Victorian eclecticism included a growing awareness of many historical styles, part of the age's focus on the problems of historical knowledge; the loosening of religious orthodoxy, which many people felt keenly as a loss of authority; information overload in this first information age, leading to a sense of randomness; capitalism, especially insofar as it afforded the middle classes more and more choices in the market; and widespread but sometimes superficial education. Her view of eclecticism, however, is most persuasive when it is understood as an effect rather than a cause.
Neo-Victorianism can be divided into two distinct categories: creative works that in some way engage with Victorian literature and culture, and scholarly works that seek to explore the shifting relationship with the Victorian period since its close in 1901, often through a critical investigation of Neo-Victorian creative works. It is with this latter category that this bibliography is concerned. Although critical discussions of historical fiction and film set in or engaging with the Victorian period have a long history, Neo-Victorianism, as an academic discipline, is a relatively new phenomenon. The plethora of Neo-Victorian creative works that have emerged in the last twenty years or so have led to increasing debate over the contemporary fascination with the Victorians and their art, literature, and history. In the course of these debates, a number of critical terms have been posited to describe this genre, including Post-, Retro- and Neo-Victorian. But in the last few years, particularly following the establishment of the online journal Neo-Victorian Studies in 2008, “Neo-Victorian” has become the favored term. Neo-Victorianism is now firmly established as a genre for scholarly investigation, though debates around what exactly constitutes a Neo-Victorian work continue. A number of scholars have argued that not all works that employ a Victorian setting can be identified as Neo-Victorian and that the term implies a “knowing” engagement with the period. According to this definition, works that employ the period merely as backdrop are excluded from the Neo-Victorian genre, and thus issues of inclusion and exclusion are potentially problematic. Critical debates have also examined the origins of the genre of Neo-Victorian works. Various critics locate the 1960s as the period in which the literary genre emerges, citing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) as early examples of the Neo-Victorian novel. This association with the 1960s also serves to reinforce the genre’s links with Postmodernism. However, as the genre has continued to expand, there has been an acknowledgment that its origins are earlier than this. Works predating Rhys’s novel include Robert Graves’s The Real David Copperfield (1933), Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater (1935), Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight (1944), and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953), while stage and film adaptations of Victorian literature have an even longer history, raising questions about the necessary chronological distance between the Victorian and the Neo-Victorian. In some respects, there remains a distinction between screen and literary studies, marking two specific trends within Neo-Victorianism. However, an increasing number of critical works engage with both of these, as well as with other areas of scholarship, such as cultural studies.
As a relatively recent academic discipline—indeed, one that is still taking shape—a work intended as an introduction to the genre of Neo-Victorianism for the general or student reader has yet to appear. However, a number of publications that have appeared since the late 1990s have proved central in terms of establishing the key concerns of Neo-Victorianism. Many of these take a broad approach to their subject, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of Neo-Victorianism through a focus on literature, film, culture, and heritage, among other issues. All seek, to varying extents, to investigate the nature of the relationship between contemporary and Victorian culture. Many of these have also proved crucial in terms of Defining the Neo-Victorian. A review of these works enables an identification of some of the key trends within Neo-Victorianism, including Gender, Postmodernism, and Reimagining Empire: Neo-Victorianism and Postcolonialism Postcolonialism. Joyce 2007 considers responses to the Victorians since the early 20th century in a work encompassing literary, cultural, and screen studies and explores a range of themes central to Neo-Victorianism, including Nostalgia, politics, and Reimagining Empire: Neo-Victorianism and Postcolonialism Postcolonialism. Kaplan 2007 employs the term “Victoriana” rather than “Neo-Victorian,” and like Joyce 2007 (whose work also predates the establishment of “Neo-Victorian” as the preferred critical term), offers an interdisciplinary work that explores a variety of key issues, including literature (fiction, biography, and the legacy of the Victorian author), film, Heritage, empire, and the historical imagination. The focus of Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, as the title suggests, is on Neo-Victorianism in the 21st century, and the authors offer a broad sweep of current trends within Neo-Victorianism. Neo-Victorianism, or Rewriting the Long Nineteenth Century includes some useful short articles and references.
This is the time of the year to curl up beside the fire with an engrossing novel. We’ve inherited the jolly family Christmas invented by Dickens which is all about feasting, affection and cheerfulness and we pay lip service to it though we know, just as he did, that being compelled to spend time with your relatives is not always the most enjoyable experience of the year.
Three of my novels, The Quincunx, The Unburied and my latest, Rustication, happen wholly or partly over Christmas and show the darker – even menacing – side of family and friendship. They are all set in the 19th century and evoke the fiction of that period. There has been a vogue in the last 25 years for the “neo-Victorian novel” (horrible term, but hard to think of a better one) which is not just a historical novel but an attempt to recreate the mindset and conventions of that period.
Here are 10 of the best exercises in the “neo-Victorian” genre which, to varying degrees, don’t merely use the 19th-century setting but exploit readers’ knowledge of the fiction of that period: