Cora Kaplan. Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. New York: Columbia University Pres, 2007. ISBN: 979-0231142175. Price: US$25.50.

Following the craze for “rewriting” the Victorian novel which was such a noticeable element of late twentieth-century Anglo-American literary culture, there were a number of critical books and essays, as well as college courses, devoted to analyzing these sometimes post-modern literary productions from John Fowles to Sarah Waters. Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism is not only the latest in these analyses of the twentieth-century “afterings” of Victorian texts but also in some ways a commentary on the very process of analyzing them. She pushes herself and her readers beyond the notion of “nostalgia” to see in the late-twentieth-century obsession with the Victorians a narrative about our own moment in history. While the craze for Victoriana—Kaplan’s felicitous label to describe the variety of the late-twentieth-century novels, biographies, and films that she discusses with critical rigor and personal reminiscence—can seem a worn out phenomenon in 2007 (though the impulse to capture that world persists), Kaplan’s analysis of the literary craze and its critical aftermath seems only too contemporary in its evocation of our contradictory and shifting times. Kaplan’s book is a collection of essays loosely connected by their consideration of “Victoriana” in all of which it is taken for granted that part of its project is to foreground the issues of race and empire, class, and gender that the Victorian pretexts marginalize or fudge. But Kaplan quickly goes beyond this by now obvious point about these works. She lays the groundwork for this move in her introduction, suggesting that the obsession with the Victorians in the post-war period is a function of the loss of a sense of history and a sign of a “restless” and “unsettled” historical imagination at work (3). In addition to the familiar issues of race, class, and gender that Victoriana foregrounds, Kaplan is also interested in “the high degree of affect” frequently involved in our responses to the Victorian past (5). The essays she brings together in this book thus engage what has been a recent and fruitful critical concern with affect as a critical category. In her first chapter she analyses the critical responses to the exemplary text Jane Eyre as a “mnemic symbol” for a shifting “constellation of stories, images and interpretations” from feminism to postcolonialism and, freshly, “the powerful politics of affect at the heart of gender and modernity” (17) . Through this lens Kaplan is able productively to link Virginia Woolf and Raymond Williams (among others) as readers and critics who continue to be both disturbed and fascinated by Jane’s gendered and trangressional anger and desire. As is characteristic of each of her chapters, the second, “Biographilia,” begins with various familiar explanations for the interest in biography in the second half of the twentieth century—a resistance to postmodernisms, a desire for narrative and plot, the happy confluence of feminism’s recovery of women writers and a readerly appetite for biography—but also the insight that the popularity of biography is partly an elegiac comment on Victorian realism. Even more interesting is her hypothesis that the biographical interest in the lives of Victorian men is a response to the late-century interest in explorations of masculinity both in the Victorian and contemporary periods. The exemplary texts are Peter Ackroyd’s celebratory biography of Dickens (1990), a pastiche of fact and fiction, and three fictional works published in 2004 that all, surprisingly, are about Henry James: Colm Toìbin’s The Master, David Lodge’s, Author, Author, and Alan Hollinghurst’s, The Line of Beauty. Kaplan links these textual representations, particularly Ackroyd’s heroic representation of Dickens, with the rise of recent critical interest in defining, analyzing and critiquing masculinity. …