They have either retold the old, familiar myths of the past so that they carry fresh messages relevant to a contemporary audience or created their own, new myths as modern vehicles of traditional truths. Many writers have combined the two techniques.
Such is the transforming artistry which the eighteen essays in Re-Embroidering the Robe examine: the remaking or new-minting of myth, in literature from 1850 to the present day, so that what it embodies and expresses speaks powerfully to the modern reader. In widely differing ways, therefore, all of the texts analysed here compel attention.
Adrienne E. Gavin is a Reader in English Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK where she specializes in Victorian Literature, Children’s Literature, and Crime Fiction. She is author of Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (2004) and co-editor of Mystery in Children’s Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural (2001) and the forthcoming Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time.
Peter Merchant gained his doctorate at Cambridge University and has worked since 1983 at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, where he is Subject Leader for English. A Victorian specialist, he is the editor of three Wordsworth Classics (A Tale of Two Cities, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and The Way We Live Now) and has contributed essays to journals including The Dickensian, Dickens Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Recusant History.