The Wilderness of (Literary) Mirrors: Victorian Heroes and Villains in Neil Gaiman’s „A Study in Emerald” (original) (raw)
Related papers
The ecology of Victorian fiction
Philosophy and Literature, 2001
In the past ten years or so, ecological literary criticism—that is, criticism concentrating on the relationship between literature and the natural environment—has become one of the fastest-growing areas in literary study. Ecocritics now have their own professional association, their own academic journal, and an impressive bibliography of scholarly studies. Ecocritical scholars divide their attention between “nature writing” and ecological themes within all literature.
Conan Doyle and the Rhetoric of Genre
English, 2023
Arthur Conan Doyle is recognised as a master of narrative. This essay argues that this mastery expresses itself in his management of genre, at a time when social and cultural changes had created a literary environment that saw the emergence of what is now called genre fiction. Crucial elements in the field of literary publishing which his stories served included the expansion of the monthly magazine market, the emergence of the short story as a popular form of fiction, and the appearance of a broad-based new reading public, well educated in the conventions of genre fiction and equipped with reading skills deriving from this ‘genre literacy’, which an author like Conan Doyle could foster and manipulate for rhetorical effect. I describe the conditions that created a taste for the popular genre fiction on which, somewhat to his chagrin, Conan Doyle’s reputation rested. He moved between genres with a versatility rivalled in his time only by Rudyard Kipling. But he also combined genres together in a single work, so as to satisfy or unsettle, disappoint, reward, or wrong-foot his readers pleasurably by playing on the expectations aroused by cues in the tales. Rather than the detective fiction which he made his own, I turn to his experiments in the genre of ‘imperial Gothic’ to illustrate this, and examine the rhetoric of three short stories with narrative tropes that depend for their effect on the genre literacy of the reading public to whom they were offered.
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels
Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens, 2008
The centerpiece of chapter 3 is Tennyson's The Princess, which again illustrates "efforts to rescue the individual from insignificance" (65), efforts Zimmerman connects to the assertion and undermining of female significance (her book also applies geological interpretation to class structure and imperialism). Chapter 4 concerns archaeology, using parallels that Victorians perceived between the ruins of ancient London and those of Pompeii, which were excavated and interpreted along similar geology-influenced lines. Employing the archaeological model, chapter 5 examines two novels by Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, whose characters "must stare down geologic and cultural pasts" and "assert themselves into the present urban landscape" while joining "fragments into whole narratives" (143). Chapter 6, a brief conclusion, is entitled "Final Fragments," perhaps acknowledging the imperfection that necessarily arises from trying to gather together so many and varied types of evidence into one volume. In all of the chapters the protean idea of trace comes and goes, operating in various ways in different contexts, but always focusing on the complicity of time and interpretation. An exercise in cultural studies and historical epistemology, Excavating Victorians perhaps is more successful in displaying, somewhat like the museum collections it discusses, evidence for the broad impact of geological thinking, including some interesting literary curiosities, than it is in opening up strikingly new critical readings of major texts. Occasionally Zimmerman's interpretations of individual passages, building upon the prevalence of geologylike phenomena in everyday environments and language-rocks, wearing away, metaphorical references to digging and uncovering, and so forth-seem like stretches. Overall, however, Excavating Victorians effectively works to alter readers' readings of the Victorian cultural landscape. I learned much from it and recommend it to anyone wishing to delve into this terrain.
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).
2013
Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben’s edited volume Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century acknowledges the unmistakable influence of the Gothic on the neo-Victorian, and the collection’s essays provide a range of nuanced discussions of the intersection between the two genres. For example, neo-Victorian novels borrow substantially from Gothic fiction by adopting its narrative motifs and formal structure. In the chapter “‘Fear is Fun and Fun is Fear’: A Reflection on Humour in Neo-Victorian Fiction”, Gutleben contemplates the humorous use of Gothic tropes in neo-Victorian fiction, while Kym Brindle’s “Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic” discusses the use of the found manuscript, a staple of Gothic fiction, in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) and Beryl Bainbridge’s Watson’s Apology (1984). Brindle argues that in both novels, we see “the processes of reading docume...