Neo-Victorian Aesthetic Movement is a movement which perfectly mingles the aesthetic sensibilities of the Victorian and Edwardian era with modern principles and technologies.
Whether it is a dress, interior decoration, family life, morals or any other topic, you will find many magazines and websites filled with Neo-Victorian ideas.
Victorian Era Culture
If you pick up any neo-Victorian novel you will find that the fiction that engages with the Victorian era presents plot, structure or perhaps, both.
Plenty of novels have reinterpreted Victorian culture in different ways like “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Fowles and many have been recently adapted to the screen as well.
Arts and Crafts in Neo-Victorian Aesthetic Movement
When it comes to arts and craft, there are many examples you can present. There are CD Players which look like old-time radios, push-button cordless phones resembling antique wall-mounted phones,
Victorian era styled clothing, Victorian furniture and much more. If you wish to see the elements of Victorian aesthetic value, you should check out the neo-romantic and fantasy art.
Many novels go to extraordinary lengths to emphasize their authenticity. Many are more fact than fiction even though the copyright page declares that it is a work of fiction.
Victorian Behaviour
People who like to adopt the Neo-Victorian style, prefer adopting Neo-Victorian behavior also.
They like to pursue and imitate standards of Victorian conduct, pronunciation and interpersonal interactions along with following the moral standards as far as possible.
Aestheticism
The aestheticism in the late nineteenth century focused on creating art for art’s sake. This means that any form of art exists for the sake of only beauty. The self-sufficiency of aesthetic standards was set taking it away from utility, morality or pleasure.
The artists and writers were of the opinion that the art should be capable of providing refined sensuous pleasure instead of conveying sentimental or moral messages.
In aestheticism, the primary means of judging view is the subjective view of beauty. So, when a painting or a poem is said to be good, aestheticism is concerned whether it is beautiful or meaningful as a work of art or not.
This is not where the moral lessons taught to the readers or viewers are considered nor its correspondence with the real world is taken into account.
This is also one of the reasons why aestheticism often faces a controversial movement right from the mid-nineteenth century.
Neo-Victorian Novels
In some literary works, texts mingle into Neo-Victorian novels with verifiable historical events like newspaper reports of the nineteenth century and other archived documents. One of the best examples for this is series of Sherlock Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle.
The identity, belief, and knowledge he brings are profound and the way be presents depth with imaginative flair is incomparable. No other scholarly biography has been able to bring its subjects to life, as this was done.
Neo-Victorian Fiction
One of the major characteristics of Neo-Victorian fiction is blurring of the line between fact and fiction. This makes the reader unable to distinguish how much is actually based on truth.
If you ask a reader, he would say that part of the real pleasure that lies while reading the books is not knowing or at least not knowing the exact facts.
In fact, the writer and the reader, both, enjoy the point where the values of past and present overlap each other.
Victorian Novelists
The Victorian novelists usually showed the prejudices of the pasts and at the same time displayed the exploitation that went hand in hand along with depicting superior moral standards.
There are so many things to look into and since you have the glimpse of the Neo-Victorian aesthetic movement, you might prefer looking into it deeper. The deeper, the more closely and attentively you look, the better it is.