Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture

Immersions and Revisitations

Nadine Boehm-Schnitker, Susanne Gruss, Nadine Boehm-Schnitker, Susanne Gruss

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781032242873
• eBook ISBN: 9781134614769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a comprehensive reflection of the processes of canonization, (un)pleasurable consumption and the emerging predominance of topics and theoretical concerns in neo-Victorianism. The repetitions and reiterations of the Victorian in contemporary culture document an unbroken fascination with the histories, technologies and achievements, as well as the injustices and atrocities, of the nineteenth century. They also reveal that, in many ways, contemporary identities are constructed through a Victorian mirror image fabricated by the desires, imaginings and critical interests of the present.

Providing analyses of current negotiations of nineteenth-century texts, discourses and traumas, this volume explores the contemporary commodification and nostalgic recreation of the past. It brings together critical perspectives of experts in the fields of Victorian literature and culture, contemporary literature, and neo-Victorianism, with contributions by leading scholars in the field including Rosario Arias, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Ho, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Sally Shuttleworth. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture interrogates current fashions in neo-Victorianism and their ideological leanings, the resurrection of cultural icons, and the reasons behind our relationship with and immersion in Victorian culture.

Index

A

Abraham, Nicolas, 12, 111–113, 122–127

Ackroyd, Peter, 21, 31, 32, 69–70, 79

adaptations: concept of, 7–9, 121; contemporary adaptations, 16n9, 137–138, 148; screen adaptations, 13, 16n6, 144; terminology for, 16n9; trauma in, 137–140, 143–149

‘aff ective immersion’, 40–42, 47

Affi nity, 9, 12, 24, 117, 133

Albert, Prince, 69

Alias Grace, 165

Alice in Wonderland, 188

All the Year Round, 35

Allen, Matthew, 70–71

Ambassadors, The, 102

Amiel, Jon, 67, 194, 200–202

Anatomy Act, 157

Angels & Insects, 31, 80, 180

Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution, 201

Anning, Mary, 114–115

Arguile, Cheryl, 34

Arias, Rosario, 12, 93, 111–112,123–124, 205

Armstrong, Isobel, 116, 118–119

Arnold, Gaynor, 75

Arnold, Matthew, 8

Art of Fiction, The, 102

Arthur and George, 69, 70

Ash, Randolph Henry, 7, 69

Asylum, The, 12, 124, 127–130,133–134

Atwood, Margaret, 165

Austen, Jane, 3, 41, 42, 43, 179

Author, Author, 69

B

Baker Street Phantom, The, 1

Bal, Mieke, 131

Barnes, Julian, 69, 70, 76

Barnett, Louise, 161

Barrett, Andrea, 14, 165, 166, 177, 183–187, 190

Barrett, Susan, 118

Barthes, Roland, 10, 22, 76, 162, 181

Basket, Fuegia, 84

Baudril...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Fashioning the Neo-Victorian—Neo-Victorian Fashions
• Commodifying the Past Canonisation, Consumption, Pleasure
• 1 Mining the Neo-Victorian Vein Prospecting for Gold, Buried Treasure and Uncertain Metal
• 2 Participatory Desires On Metalepsis, Immersion and the Re-Plotting of the Victorian
• 3 Nostalgia and Material Culture Present-ing the Past in Cranford
• Resurrecting Cultural Icons Spectral Returns
• 4 ‘Eminent Victorians' and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography
• 5 Bio-Fiction Neo-Victorian Revisions of Evolution and Genetics
• 6 Neo-Victorian Gay Fictions A Critique of Stereotyping and Self-Reflexivity
• Traces, Traumas and Retrospective Anxieties
• 7 Traces and Vestiges of the Victorian Past in Contemporary Fiction
• 8 Spectres of the Past Reading the Phantom of Family Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction
• 9 Narratives of Sexual Trauma in Contemporary Adaptations of The Woman in White
• Refashioning (Neo-) Victorian Discourses
• 10 The Legacy of Medical Sensationalism in The Crimson Petal and the White and The Dress Lodger
• 11 The Neo-Victorian-at-Sea Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian
• 12 From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond Fearful Symmetries
• Coda The Firm of Charles and Charles—Authorship, Science and Neo-Victorian Masculinities
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index