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

Abstract

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.