Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives

For young adults without extensive historical knowledge, the genre of historical fiction—and neo-Victorian narratives—can be enticing and productive as a means to access the past to see how it relates to the readers’ present. This introduction to Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives focuses on the conflation between young adult and neo-Victorian narratives, how they elucidate the past for the present, and how the similarly aged characters are embodied in those narratives. This introduction explores our current culture’s self-conscious fascination with Victorian authors, characters, and narratives as well as the implications and concerns of potentially appropriative rewritings of persons, texts, tropes, and characters—factual, fictional and f(r)ictional—of the long nineteenth century in new iterations and how the popular imagination has turned back the clock to engage, embody, and document young adults as people and/or characters. The discussions that follow are based on the premise that proof of the oft-demonstrated misjudgement of the savviness of readers in the tween to young adult age groups is found in the range of narratives focused on authors and their books from the long nineteenth century.