The author as the antiquarian: selling Victorian culture to readers of neo-Victorian novels and steampunk comics (original) (raw)

Monsters against Empire: The Politics and Poetics of Neo-Victorian Metafiction in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, 2012

This chapter analyses the specific way in which Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill in their graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen appropriate Victorian Gothic fiction into a highly elaborate metafictional crossover. Special focus is put on the role of hybridity and otherness, both in the Victorian source material and in the neo-Victorian rewriting , and on the critique of discourses of power.

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.

Finding Freedom in a Neo-Victorian World: The Status of Victorian Women as Depicted in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White

2017

This essay explores the status of women and their pursuit of freedom from the control of men in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. Faber's story is a part of the neo-Victorian genre, which is discussed in some detail in chapter two. Neo-Victorian writers, unlike their predecessors of the nineteenth century, are free to explore explicit subjects, such as prostitution, without holding back which is exactly what Faber does in his novel. He also brings the lives of women into the spotlight. The neo-Victorian element of The Crimson Petal and the White is obvious in his portrayal of Victorian women. To ensure a deeper understanding of the Victorian world as created by Faber, women's status in nineteenth century England is also touched upon. Furthermore, the idea of the spheres, which separates the genders into the domestic sphere and the public sphere, as well as their education and mental abilities, is examined, which highlights the patriarchal control over women. The discussion on Victorian women ends with a brief examination of the emerging fight for equality which ties in with the fate of Faber's female characters. The subject of this essay is the female characters of The Crimson Petal and the White: Sugar, Agnes and Sophie, and their positions within the male-dominated society of Victorian London. The part of the essay which focuses on the female characters is divided into three chapters, and each highlights aspects the lives of Sugar, Agnes and Sophie and how they escaped Faber's patriarchal society. The essay discusses how Sugar, the novel's female protagonist, is first introduced as a prostitute that by the end of the novel ends up being a feminist heroine and the saviour of both Agnes and Sophie. The fate of Sophie is also discussed, which further accentuates Sugar's feminist legacy.

The Future of Victorian Literature

Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, 2012

This history of Victorian literature’s role in twentieth- and twenty-first century popular culture and academic discourse culminates with a discussion of three ways that steampunk and neo-Victorian fiction differ from postmodernism.

“The Fashions of the Current Season”: Recent Critical Work on Victorian Sensation Fiction

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2017

Henry Mansel, writing in 1863, was confident in his prediction that the current popular vogue for sensation novels was an ephemeral phase, soon to pass into a deserved oblivion. Yet by the end of a decade marked by extensive and frequently hysterical debates over the genre, the future Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, was still bemoaning the ubiquity of sensation fiction: “the world may congratulate itself when the last sensational novel has been written and forgotten” (424). Mansel and Austin would doubtless have been astounded (and appalled) at the current status of mid-Victorian sensation fiction in the realm of academic scholarship. Far from being a long-forgotten, inconsequential moment in literary history, the sensation novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Ouida have prompted a plethora of critical studies, which have impacted on our wider understanding of the dynamics and influences of mid-Victorian literary and publishing practices.