The Future of Victorian Literature (original) (raw)
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With the arrival of new technologies, the population has gained easy access to cultural products of almost any historical period. Curiously, one of the most significant years for our contemporaries seems to be the Victorian and Edwardian periods, giving rise to a whole group known as Neo-Victorians. Within this community, a sub-cultural movement, called steampunk, emerges. The members of this group introduce elements of that time in their daily life, manipulating new technologies to resemble inventions of the past. My paper will explore the visibility that this movement has gained thanks to films and novels produced in the twenty-first century and the new identities rising from consuming the elements of Victorian societies and the influence of this cultural products in present-day societies. In my analysis, I will use some works of the Victorian period, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the reinterpretations of their characters made in contemporary productions, such as the Mina Harker appearing in Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) to show the relevance of Victorian culture within the steampunk movement. To bestow my arguments with an appropriate theoretical framework, I will make use of Butlerian notions about identity and Rosi Braidotti’s ideas on the posthuman and the influence of technology in contemporary societies. My main thesis is that the consumption of the ideas and stereotypes of the late decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth have led to an increased visibility of their customs and stereotypical preconceptions in contemporary movements that feel attracted towards this particular historical period.
Reviving the Victorians in the Twenty-First Century : Writing about the Present ?
2016
In his work Why Read? Mark Edmundson observes that “[w]e read to assert ourselves, to sharpen our analytical faculties. We read to debunk the myths. We read to know the other (...)” (52). While the reading process does not offer the “final” or “ultimate” truth, it encourages critical reflection both on the past and the present. In my paper I strive to answer the question: what does it mean to read Neo-Victorian fiction and what does this act signify for the present and for the modern reader? Consequently, I strive to define neo-Victorian fiction. While adopting Louisa Hadley’s notion of ventriloquism, I interpret neo-Victorian texts as literary mediums set in the nineteenth-century past, yet also consciously narrating the present. Furthermore, based on L. Hadley’s, A. Heilmann’s and M. Llewelyn’s works, I analyse the idea of the historical involvement of neo-Victorian fiction against the notions of parody and pastiche. Moreover, I discuss the process of reviving the popular nineteen...
Putting the 'Neo' Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2010
This article discusses the tendency in recent Neo-Victorian Studies to privilege the influence of the nineteenth century on the neo-Victorian novel at the expense of postmodern or contemporary influences. I explore how such favouritism towards the nineteenth century has produced the pathological framing of neo-Victorian fictional practices as nostalgic, fetishistic and derivative of Victorian fiction, giving the Victorian ‘original’ precedence over the contemporary neo-Victorian ‘copy’. I investigate assertions of the neo-Victorian novel’s failure to fulfil postmodern benchmarks, and consider whether this move contributes to a general assertion of postmodernism’s dwindling relevance or whether it augurs a neo-conservative shift away from literary fiction’s subversive potential. Finally, I proffer the neo-Victorian novel’s contribution to recognitive justice as the postmodern revisionist criterion most likely to ensure the fledgling genre’s significance to future generations, as well as to politically marginalised groups in the present.
A Brief Introduction into the branches of Victorian Literature
In this paper, the main literary branches of Victorian literature, alongside the social, moral and political environment of this epoch will be explained. Throughout these pages, the needs of an era greatly affected by the arriving of the Industrial Revolution will be portrayed through the explanation of how the writers of the most influential literary genres of their time attempted to show their criticism towards the consequences of Industrialism, thus making a previous contextualization of this epoch imperative, so the reader may be able to picture the decadence of a period overcome by extreme poverty and an overwhelming working class prejudiced by an aristocratic minority, through the exemplification of the social and moral environment in works from writers like Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens. The main method conducted for the creation of this paper was the consultation of secondary and tertiary sources such as Internet articles and literary analysis from academics of Higher Education institutions. Throughout this research, it became evident that all three movements (Aestheticism, Realism and Romanticism) shared the common goal of functioning as counter-movements of the Industrial Revolution and of the consequences it brought to British society, therefore making the present analysis necessary to contextualize a period where technology, rational thought and social decadence became a rule.