Introduction: Contemporary Victoriana: Victorian Literature and Popular Cultures

“For most of us, the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant […] that we are content to leave the past where we find it” (Ezra Pound, 1918). “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (Benjamin 462). In Alan Hollinghurst’s 2011 novel The Stranger’s Child, the reference to Alfred, Lord Tennyson partakes of the gener..