What these YA Fantasies all share is a fascination with history not as history, but as a way of conceptualising the parental generation. Tolkien-Lewis’s far distant medieval pageant has no relevance here: it is too far back. ‘Victorian times’ might seem a little remote too — but the key, I think, is that these fantasies operate by the symbolic rather than chronological logic. The Victorian-Edwardian period is a style (of dress, of machinery); a code (repressive and authoritarian, if elegantly so) and embodiment of ‘past-ness’ itself. The key conceptual perspective here is Jameson’s Postmodernism (1990), and his argument that one of the features if postmodernity is the replacement of history as lived experience with history as a pastiche of empty visual styles (of dress, of architecture and so on) that are then shuffled about by culture.

And the movie review that led me to that essay.