Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century

Description

This volume, the third in Rodopi's Neo-Victorian Series, reassesses neo-Victorianism as a quintessentially Gothic movement. Through their revival of bygone spectres, their obsession with forgotten skeletons in the cupboard, and their exploration of nineteenth-century extremities, neo-Victorian works not only reflect our contemporary Gothic culture but also reactivate it and even enrich it with new variations such as postcolonial, eco or steampunk Gothic. Addressed to scholars and students of both Gothic and Neo-Victorian Studies, this volume will also interest contemporary literature specialists, cultural theorists, and those working on popular historical memory, as it explores the paradox of culture's coincident turn to ethics and sensationalism. As exemplified in its generic variety and hybridity, neo-Victorian Gothic resorts to the spectacularisation of horror while simultaneously demonstrating the hyperreal, textual and self-reflexive nature of these spectacles, just as it resorts to the exploitation of hyperbolic and violent sexuality at the same time as challenging sexual norms and identity politics. In spite of these apparent contradictions, the Gothic forms of neo-Victorianism demonstrate their fundamentally ethical goal of interrogating the uncertain limits between self and other, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, past and present. Tags: Modern, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, European, 19th Century, Literary Criticism, Gothic & Romance, History Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations PART I Imperial Impostures and Improprieties 1. The Limits of Neo-Victorian History: Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and The Swan Thieves 2. Reclaiming Plots: Albert Wendt’s ‘Prospecting’ and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Ola Nā Iwi as Postcolonial Neo-Victorian Gothic 3. Monsters against Empire: The Politics and Poetics of Neo-Victorian Metafiction in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 4. A Bodily Metaphorics of Unsettlement: Leora Farber’s Dis-Location / Re-Location as Neo-Victorian Gothic PART II The Horrid and the Sexy 5. Neo-Victorian Gothic and Spectral Sexuality in Colm Tóibín’s The Master 6. ‘Jack the Ripper’ as Neo-Victorian Gothic Fiction: Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Sallies into a Late Victorian Case and Myth 7. Chasing the Dragon: Bangtails, Toffs, Jack and Johnny in Neo-Victorian Fiction 8. Neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Fantasies of Self-Abjection PART III Hybrid Forms 9. Epistemological Rupture and the Gothic Sublime in Slouching Towards Bedlam 10. Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic 11. ‘Fear Is Fun and Fun Is Fear’: A Reflexion on Humour in Neo-Victorian Gothic Contributors Index