Drawing on the Victorians

The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts

Anna Maria Jones, Rebecca N. Mitchell

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780821422472
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445877
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.

From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today's steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored.

In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko's Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch' s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present.

Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations on those pages.

Abbott, Edwin: Flatland, 25, 262n12

Aboriginals Protection and Restriction on the Sale of Opium Act, 338, 340n16

Adams, Jack [Alcanoan O. Grisgby and Mary P. Lowe], 117n11

Adamson, Robert, 331–32

adaptation, 4, 6–7, 22, 24, 151–52; studies of, 24, 67, 172n7, 303; transculturation in, 67–68, 72–73; verbalization (narrativization, novelization), 14, 18, 24, 39–42. Also see entries for individual authors for adaptations of specific works

advertising, 50, 129, 130, 136, 138, 258; before-and-after in, 245; cards, 264n36 (see also ephemera); matrimonial, 270, 283, 294n2, 295n7, 298n40

advice: in books, 269 (see also self-help); in periodicals, 272, 323; in séances, 139–41, 140

Aestheticism: Aesthetic dress, 257; Aesthetic movement, 12, 13, 14, 211, 240, 255–58, 260n1, 320; figure of the Aesthete, 12, 13, 14, 211, 257–58. See also l’art pour l’art

alchemy, 125–26

Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women, 307, 327n26

Alken, Henry, 41, 55

Allen, Gale, 233n22

All the Year Round, 34n47, 280

Altick, Richard, 10

American McGee’s Alice and Madness Returns, 5, 70

anachronism, 11, 27, 60, 143, 171, 200, 237, 253, 255

Anderson, Patricia, 48

Anderson, Pet and Wella, 122–23, 144n6, 144n7

Andrevon, Jean-Pierre, and Georges Pichard: Ceux-là, 75

Anglocentrism, 68

anime, 6, 308

Antal, Frederick, 34n46

anti-Semitism, 151–52, 156. See also Jew, figure of

Arias, Rosario, and Patricia Pulham, 5

Armour, George Denholm: “A Sportsman’s Diary,” 251–52

Armstrong, Nancy, 11

art: criticism, 9; history as discipline, 9, 123–24, 240; journals, 11–12; modes of production, 10 (see also Benjamin, Walter); movements (s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Palimpsest
• I. Adaptations
• II. Graphic Epistemologies
• III. Refigured Ideologies
• IV. Temporal Images
• V. Picturing Readers
• Afterword: Photography, Palimpsests, and the Neo-Victorian
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index