ABSTRACT
Fictions that appropriate, extend, or otherwise reimagine nineteenth-century plots, characters, and histories exhibit both desire for and alienation from the Victorian period, and this necessary tension preoccupies neo-Victorian scholars. This chapter demonstrates the logic of neo-Victorian literature parallels the logic of nonsense, which relies on a similar set of internal tensions, before addressing the function of the Dapper Men's playful absurdities. Some scholars of neo-Victorian literature explicitly consider the role of play as both a narrative strategy and mode of reading that is particularly apt for the ambiguities and contradictions of neo-Victorian fictions. Return of the Dapper Men is in fact a narrative about the narratives Victorians, Edwardians, and contemporary readers tell about children, revealing through strategies of appropriation and revision the instability of childhood innocence as a construct. McCann and Lee similarly deploy nonsense, a form with roots in Romantic and Victorian ideologies of childhood, to enact the disintegration of those ideologies.
