Starting from a very brief introduction to Shklovsky’s concept in the context of English literature, this article considers two main aspects of liter- ary estrangements in neo-Victorian fiction. The first part examines the struc- tural use of defamiliarization and foregrounding of the innovative narrative strategies John Fowles made use of in his seminal 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles ‘made strange’ the Victorian novel by reinventing its form, promoting a renovation of realism and a reconsideration of the great themes of Victorian fiction through a creative use of narrative distance and of the narratorial voice.
The second part of the article focuses on the ‘restoration’ of the object mentioned by Shklovsky, referring to a specific material and cultural object – the fossil – connoted by a deep epistemic tension, analyzed by Foucault and Mitchell. This is examined as a catalyst of estrangement in some neo-Victori- an novels of the last fifty years.
