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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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Universidad de Alicante
1993-11-01
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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 |
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. |
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ISSN: | 0214-4808 2171-861X |