The Time of the PhD:

Doctoral Research in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Abstract

This article argues that recent changes in higher education have contributed to anxieties about the present and future state of universities, and that a strand of neo-Victorian fiction arises as a response to these. As I demonstrate, the nineteenth century is an era of particular significance for universities as it is also an era of dramatic change, heralding the arrival of the modern idea of research and the PhD degree. In neo-Victorian academic fiction, a subgenre of the neo-Victorian novel, the figure of the doctoral researcher and the activity of research are central to the novel’s examination of the nineteenth-century past. The article then overviews in brief the characteristics of this subgenre before analysing two novels in which doctoral researchers engage with the nineteenth-century past, Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009) and Rachael King’s Magpie Hall (2009).