ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book presents case studies which is lead to a major imperative for the postmodern critic of Victorian literature, an acknowledgment that Realism, as imagined by the Victorians, has both deep roots and unexpected branches. The father figure who emerges from Victorian realist narrative does not resemble many figures from the previous century. He is not the gothic father of Walpole or Radcliffe, the recovered father who anchors the comic endings of Smollett or Fielding foundling narratives, or a Richardsonian patriarch, waiting at the receiving end of his daughter's epistolary effusions. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son is the autobiographical narrative of one man's attempt to understand his own 'Victorian' father. However, Gosse inherits from other children writing about fathers a connection between describing the patriarch and reconceptualizing his own relationship to literary history.
