James McCreet's Neo-Victorian Novels as Historiographic Metafictional Texts

James McCreet (b. 1971) is a contemporary British novelist who has published novels that revisit the Victorian Age to write back to the Victorian center. McCreet's novels The Incendiary's Trail (2009), The Vice Society (2010), The Thieves' Labyrinth (2011), and The Masked Adversary (2012) are written in the neo-Victorian mode that critiques the Victorian representations of history and cultural practices. This literary mode of writing has recently attracted unprecedented attention from the literary critics.

Though McCreet's neo-Victorian novels provide an interesting literary material to unearth, McCreet's novels have not been addressed in the academic field. Hence, the significance of this study emanates from its endeavor to be a contribution to this unexplored area of research.

The study begins first by considering the critical scene that has led to the interest in the neo-Victorian novel, on the one hand, and in the historiographic metafictional novel, on the other. The study then proceeds to establish John Fowles' (1926-2005) The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) as a reference point for reading McCreet's neo-Victorian novels as historiographic metafictional texts. As such, the study endeavors to present an analytical reading of McCreet's neo-Victorian novels using the theoretical framework when approaching the historiographic metafictional novel.  Hutcheon considers the historiographic metafictional novel a postmodern novel. Through this approach, the study aims to examine the nineteenth-century modes of writing that Fowles and McCreet appropriate and subvert using postmodern strategies such as self-reflexivity, parody, intertextuality, and irony. Finally, the study delineates the way McCreet brings to the center some of the stories of the marginalized individuals in the Victorian society.

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