The symbol made text: Charles Palliser's postmodernist re-writing of Dickens in The Quincunx

Early reviewers of The Quincunx (1989) immediately recognised the novel's striking stylistic and thematic indebtedness to Dickens and to other early Victorian writers, a fact that led them to describe Charles Palliser's first novel as a brilliant attempt to reproduce an early Vi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Onega Jaén, Susana
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Universidad de Alicante 1993-11-01
Series:Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses
Online Access:https://raei.ua.es/article/view/1993-n6-the-symbol-made-text-charles-pallisers-postmodernist-re-writing-of-dickens-in-the-quincunx
Description
Summary:Early reviewers of The Quincunx (1989) immediately recognised the novel's striking stylistic and thematic indebtedness to Dickens and to other early Victorian writers, a fact that led them to describe Charles Palliser's first novel as a brilliant attempt to reproduce an early Victorian novel. However, closer examination reveals that The Quincunx is not merely a belated imitation of Victorian fiction, but rather a neatly structured, symbolically complex and highly self-conscious parody of it, in line with other contemporary historiographic metafictions, like The French Lieutenant's Woman or The Name of the Rose, and expresses Palliser's own postmodernist world-view.
ISSN:0214-4808
2171-861X