Victorian afterlife : postmodern culture rewrites the nineteenth century /

This well-titled collection is obsessed with death and resurrection: its raison d'etre is the contemporary "afterlife" of things Victorian, from underwear to public history, its promise the indisputable primacy of the memory of the (mainly British) 19th century in the discourses of contemporary US popular culture. This does not mean thinking historically, which Frederic Jameson (Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, CH, Apr'91) says has been forgotten in any case, and Jameson's is perhaps the name most invoked (and politely quarreled with) in this deep, learned, and playful book. The editorial spirit also borrows from the Victorian aesthetic of redundance: the revisitation of concepts like "mourning" and "the uncanny" in apparently unrelated contexts turns over (and overturns) the paradox of consuming/ingesting/digesting the past and making oneself out of it. All the essays are good; some are better. Mary Favret on Jane Austen movies and Ian Blaucom on the literature and historiography of the Irish famine are superb; other contributors deal engagingly with Wilde, computers, Jane Campion, postcolonial politics, museology, A.S. Byatt, novels, photography, Alice, Dracula, and the Queen who reigned over (but could not rein in) the age. Arresting cover art, readable notes. For strong undergraduate programs in literary and cultural studies; educated general readers; graduate collections. F. Alaya emeritus, Ramapo College of New Jersey