Deviance In Neo Victorian Culture

This book argues that ‘deviance’ represents a central issue in neo-Victorian culture, and that the very concept of neo-Victorianism is based upon the idea of ‘diverging’ from accepted notions regarding the nineteenth-century frame of mind. However, the study of the ways in which the Victorian age has been revised by contemporary authors does not only entail analogies with the present but proves – by introducing what is perhaps a more pertinent description of the nineteenth century – that it was much more ‘deviant’ than it is usually depicted and perceived. Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation explores a wide variety of textual forms, from novels to TV series, from movies and graphic novels to visual art. The scholarly and educational purpose of this study is to stimulate readers to approach neo-Victorianism as a complex cultural phenomenon.

Highlighting neo-Victorian humour’s crucial role in shaping contemporary re-visions of nineteenth-century culture, this volume explores the major aesthetic, ideological and ethical issues raised by refracting the past through a comic lens, especially through self-conscious irony, parody, and black humour.

Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were “mad.” Such portraits demand a “rediagnosing” of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.

In the words of J. Brooks Boustan, the empathic reader is a participant-observer, who, as they read, is both subject to the disruptive and disturbing responses that characters and texts provoke, and aware of the role they are invited to play when responding to fiction. Calling upon the writings of Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Sarah Waters, Michael Cox and Jane Harris, this book examines the ethics of the text-reader relationship in neo-Victorian literature, focusing upon the role played by empathy in this engagement. Bringing together recent cultural and theoretical research on narrative temporality, empathy and affect, Muren Zhang presents neo-Victorian literature as a genre defined by its experimentation with 'empathetic narrative'. Broken down into themes such as voyeurism, shame, nausea, space and place, Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading argues that such literature pushes the reader to critically reflect upon their reading expectations and strategies, as well as their wider ethical responsibilities. As a result, Zhang breathes new life into the debates associated with the genre and demonstrates new ways of reading and valuing these contemporary texts, providing a future-orientated, reparative and politically meaningful way of reading neo-Victorian literature and culture.

This book represents the first full-length study of the relationship between neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. It examines the diverse and multiple legacies of Victorian popular fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, tracing their influence on a range of genres and works, including detective fiction, YA writing, Gothic literature, and stage and screen adaptations. In doing so, it forces a reappraisal of critical understandings of neo-Victorianism in terms of its origins and meanings, as well as offering an important critical intervention in popular fiction studies. The work traces the afterlife of Victorian sensation fiction, taking in the neo-Gothic writing of Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt, contemporary popular historical detective and YA fiction by authors including Elizabeth Peters and Philip Pullman, and the literary fiction of writers such as Joanne Harris and Charles Palliser. The work will appeal to scholars and students of Victorian fiction, neo-Victorianism, and popular culture alike.

This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the “bride” of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters. Hear the authors talk about the collection here: https://nrftsjournal.org/monsters-all-are-we-not-an-interview-with-julie-grossman-and-will-scheibel/

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.