The Future of Victorian Literature (original) (raw)
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.
WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 2009
Systems belong to a subgenre of literary criticism we might call "Literature and . . . " During the past decade, a vast number of books and dissertations have investigated links between literature and the many facets of culture and history that inform literary evolution and vice versa. These books are far too numerous to catalog, but a few titles will illustrate the point: Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America by Deborah Nelson (confessional poetry and privacy law), Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Janis McLarren Caldwell, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life by Victoria Rosner, (literature and architecture/interior design), Consciousness and the Novel by David Lodge. While the subgenre is by no means new, its widespread and growing predominance is notable. "Literature and . . . " seems to be the moment's method of choice. There are good reasons for this. Of course, there is probably no facet of life that has not been represented in works of literature. In addition, one legacy of the high-theory moment of the 1980s and 1990s has been a collective commitment to examining the interconnections between literature, history, and politics. To some degree, that same high-theory moment has led to a backlash: a generation of scholars educated on the abstractions of theory have sought to examine literature's concrete relationships to culture.
Neo-Victorian fiction is one of a multitude of products available in today's literary market. Moreover, it has some specific features which help it stand out on the shelf. Among the elements serving to differentiate it from other modern literary trends are elements of the Victorian refashioned as a style – Victoriana (cf. Joyce 2007: 71): the historical background, including all the paraphernalia: setting (which can be compared to stage decorations), costumes, props (especially objects no longer in use), more or less archaic language, etc. These elements of a previous age can be either meticulously researched and strive to be as faithful as possible to what we know of the past or serve as a basis for a more contemporary or fantastic story. The Victorian 'air', however, must remain. On the other hand, among the aspects which make neo-Victorian fiction stand apart from most of its nineteenth century counterparts are a more overt treatment of – among other things – sex and violence. Hence the cover of the first issue of Alan Moore's “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” features murder, rape and drugs, while at the same time imitating nineteenth-century illustrations. Similarly, the extradiegetic but insistently intrusive narrator of Michel Faber's “The Crimson Petal and the White” promises to the reader, in case s/he is bored after the first sixty of the novel's nine hundred pages, that “fucking, madness, abduction and violent death” are to come (2002: 65).
Introduction to Victorian and Twentieth‐Century Literature; Chronology 1800–2006
2014
Unlike the preceding three volumes in this Companion to British Literature -the Medieval, Early Modern, and Long Eighteenth Century -the current one attempts to cover at least two distinct periods: the Victorian and the Twentieth Century. To make matters more difficult, the second of these hardly counts as a single period; it is less an epoch than a placeholder. In terms of periodization, the Victorian era is succeeded -or some might say, overthrown -by the Modern. But modernism is not capacious enough to encompass the various kinds of literary art that emerged in Britain following World War II, the postmodern and the postcolonial, for example. We could follow the lead of recent scholars and expand the modernist period beyond the "high" to include the "late" and arguably the "post" as well. But this conceptual as well as temporal expansion does not take in the vital British literature written from the 1970s onward, an historical era distinct from the "postwar" that critics refer to, for now, as the "contemporary" (see English 2006). Of course, all periods are designated after they have finished, including the Victorian, which was very much a modernist creation. Yet it is unlikely we will come to call the period stretching from the middle of the last century to the early decades of the new millennium, from the breakup of Britain's empire to the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, "Elizabethan." And this despite the Victorian longevity of the Windsor monarch's reign. The queen is one and the same, but the national culture is anything but. It is difficult imagining the contemporary equivalent of Eminent Victorians (1918) emerging in the next few years. Who would the emblematic figures of this "period" be? The Beatles, Maggie Thatcher, Salman Rushdie, and David Beckham, perhaps? But this selection -or any selection, even a tendentious one like Strachey's -would probably not provide fodder for a cultural gestalt in the way that Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon did.
Neo-Victorian (Women) Writers B.A.
2020
The focus in this paper lies on feminist interpretations of the neo-Victorian mode of contemporary historical fiction, as written by female authors. First, I will therefore give an overview of what neo-Victorianism in literature is and explore reasons and explanations for why the return to the Victorian period in modern-day fiction is frequent and how its cultural relevance and this ‘return to the past’ can (re-)shape the definition of self. Second, I will focus on the conditions under which the 19th century re-appears in and continues to inform our globalized present through female-written literature. Feminist theories will be included in the discussion to understand why neo-Victorian historical fiction is an important medium for female writers to project a critique of bygone times into the present. This will entail a detailed analysis of Belinda Starling’s 2006 novel The Journal of Dora Damage, touching on and drawing comparisons to other works. I will furthermore explore how Starling contrasts a young Victorian heroine – who is submerged in the time’s restrictive gender roles and strict sexual codes – with Victorian pornography and sexuality. Lastly, I will discuss how this, in turn, can be interpreted as a drive for self-knowledge and an even parodic attempt to shape the future by returning to the past – or if such an ambitious approach is even possible.