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INTRODUCTION very little scholarly work that has attempted to historicize postmodern rewritings of Victorian culture. 2 By bringing together a diverse and noted collection of cultural critics, we have attempted to begin a discussion of postmodernism's privileging of the Victorian as its historical" other." An intense historiographical curiosity, we believe, drives 1980s and'90s Victorian revivalism and locates the Victorian age as historically central to late-century postmodern consciousness. The scale of the phenomenon itself is enormous. Merchant and Ivory, Iain Softley, and Ang Lee have filmed and marketed EM Forster and Jane Austen novels, as the groundless postmodern imagination projects a" Victorian feel" into Regency and early high-modern texts alike. AS Byatt's post-Victorian pastiche, Possession, won the Booker Prize, vaulting her into the first rank of highbrow novelists. The mainstream popularity of Caleb …