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

• 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

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.