Neo-Victorian Fiction Research Articles

Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012)

News of the discoveries of natural grottos filled the pages of newspapers and journals throughout the nineteenth century. Additionally, artificial grottos opened regularly for the entertainment of the public and were commonplace in the cultural and literary products of the period. In this article, I analyse neo-Victorian appropriations of nineteenth-century grottos as Foucauldian heterotopias through two case studies: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012). Overall’s and Fox’s novels illustrate how the heterotopic features of the Victorian grotto are expanded in neo-Victorian fiction as counter-spaces of emplacement that enable heterochronic forms of resistance.

‘blotted into the unreadable darkness’: Feminist Solidarity as Feminist Utopia in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002)

This article investigates the representation of feminist solidarity as feminist utopia through the relationship between Sugar and Agnes, the female protagonists of Michel Faber's neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). The article argues that the two women's relationship serves as a metaphor for the feminist debate on difference, negotiated in neo-Victorian fiction, and dramatises the process whereby support is consciously and actively offered in order to defy oppression and alleviate suffering, despite their different positionalities. A key aspect of this process is the (literal and metaphorical) journey which Sugar undertakes to the sites of Agnes's lived experience, which provides her with an insight into the kind of oppression Agnes experiences and enables her to offer the latter woman the assistance she needs. Feminist solidarity, the article asserts, is ultimately conceptualised as a feminist utopia, as Agnes's desired mode of aid entails that she chase her own utopia once Sugar liberates her. In this way, the text asserts the necessity of thinking about feminist solidarity as feasible within the context of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century feminist controversies on that issue.

The Mystery of History: To Say Nothing of the Dog as Neo-Victorian Fiction

The Mystery of History: To Say Nothing of the Dog as Neo-Victorian Fiction

Self-Fashioning Illusions: Twinship, Subjectivity, and Neo-Victorianism in Christopher Priest’s 
The Prestige

Abstract Examining the conflicting approaches to the fragmentation of the self and the feasibility of self-awareness featured in Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (1995), this article reflects on the evaluation, and subsequent reinvention, of the Victorian era in the genre commonly known as neo-Victorian fiction. Alfred Borden, the novel’s Victorian protagonist, fashions himself as a unique and unified individual even though his identity is, in fact, composite and alternatingly shared between twin brothers. In contrast, Andrew Westley, Borden’s twentieth-century descendant, experiences an instinctive sense of division through which he rationalizes his life. Featured in temporally distinct storylines, these conflicting perspectives reflect the tensions at work in the neo-Victorian return to the Victorian past. Silencing multiplicity and negating fragmentation, the Victorian characters echo scholarly objections to the use of the term ‘Victorian’: its apparent assertion of coherence and homogeneity when it is actually called to signify an extremely diverse historical period. Conversely, by means of the twentieth-century protagonist’s need to comprehend and embrace division, a need which is fulfilled through Andrew’s familiarization with and acceptance of his past, the novel acknowledges the multivalence of the ‘Victorian’ and its indisputable connection to the present. Exploring Victorian and twentieth-century appreciations of subjectivity, The Prestige sheds light into neo-Victorianism’s self-fashioning strategies, raising the question whether and to what extent neo-Victorian reconfigurations of the Victorian era (re)discover the past, or operate on our potentially misleading preconceptions about the nineteenth century.

“I did as others did and as others had me do”: Postcolonial (Mis)Representations and Perpetrator Trauma in Season 1 of Taboo (2017-)

Neo-Victorian fiction has been concerned with historically oppressed and traumatised characters from the 1990s onwards (Llewellyn 2008). More recently, neo-Victorianism on screen has shifted its attention to the figure of the perpetrator and their unresolved guilt, as in the TV series Penny Dreadful (Logan 2014-2016) or Taboo (Knight, Hardy and Hardy 2017-present). However, perpetrator trauma is an under-theorised field in the humanities (Morag 2018), neo-Victorian studies included. This article analyses Taboo as a neo-Victorian postcolonial text that explores the trauma of its protagonist James Delaney, an imperial perpetrator who transported and sold African slaves in the Middle Passage for the East India Company. Although the series is not set in the Victorian period, neo-Victorianism is here understood as fiction expanding beyond the historical boundaries of the Victorian era and that presents the long nineteenth century as synonymous with the empire (Ho 2012: 4). Thus, I argue that postcolonial texts like Taboo should be considered neo-Victorian since they are set in the nineteenth century to respond to and contest (neo-)imperial practices. However, neo-Victorian postcolonialism offers ambivalent representations of the British Empire, as it simultaneously critiques and reproduces its ideologies (Ho 2012; Primorac 2018). This article examines the ways in which Taboo follows this contradictory pattern, since it seemingly denounces the imperial atrocity of the slave trade through Delaney’s perpetrator trauma, while simultaneously perpetuating it through his future colonizing trip to the Americas. Hence, Delaney is portrayed as an anti-hero in the series, given that he is both the enemy and the very product of the British Empire.

Young Adult Crisis Heterotopias and Feminist Revisions in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes Series

In this article, we investigate neo-Victorian YA fiction’s efforts to mirror twenty-first-century feminist ideals in nineteenth-century spaces through examining the role of heterotopia in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019). We first consider how the novels’ steampunk elements figure in Gleason’s feminist framing of neo-Victorian London, particularly in terms of common heterotopias—primarily the garden and the museum—that the protagonists briefly navigate over the course of the series. Second, we explore how the series’ three female protagonists each occupy spaces that function as pseudo—“heterotopias of crisis”—that is, while each of them claims space within which to subvert expectations of women, these spaces and the activities they support are themselves fundamentally insular and yield no socio-cultural critique. Finally, we consider how the spaces created and occupied by the books’ villain, known as the Ankh, serve as heterotopias. We find that the fact that the only truly heterotopic spaces in the novels belong to the villain, whose transgressive deviance the series frames as a bridge too far, illustrates how disappointingly limited neo-Victorian YA can be in its ability to offer subversive mirrors to twenty-first-century feminism.

Heterotopic Proliferation in E. S. Thomson’s Jem Flockhart Series

This article explores the convergence, inversion, and collapse of heterotopic spaces in E. S. Thomson’s neo-Victorian Jem Flockhart series about a cross-dressing female apothecary in mid-nineteenth-century London. The eponymous first-person narrator becomes embroiled in the detection of horrific murder cases, with the action traversing a wide range of Michel Foucault’s exemplary Other spaces, including hospitals, graveyards, brothels, prisons, asylums, and colonies, with the series substituting the garden for Foucault’s ship as the paradigmatic heterotopia. These myriad juxtaposed sites, which facilitate divergence from societal norms while seemingly sequestering forms of alterity and resistance, repeatedly merge into one another in Thomson’s novels, destabilising distinct kinds of heterotopias and heterotopic functions. Jem’s doubled queerness as a cross-dressing lesbian beloved by their Watsonean side-kick, the junior architect William Quartermain, complicates the protagonist’s role in helping readers negotiate the re-imagined Victorian metropolis and its unequal power structures. Simultaneously defending/reaffirming and contesting/subverting the status quo, Jem’s body itself becomes a microcosmic heterotopia, problematising the elision of agency in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the term. The proliferation of heterotopias in Thomson’s series suggests that neo-Victorian fiction reconfigures the nineteenth century into a vast network of confining, contested, and liberating Other spaces.

Carnage, medicine and "The Woman Question" : representations of the Crimean war in neo-Victorian fiction

The aim of this article is to analyse and compare representations of the Crimean war in three neo-Victorian novels, Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie (1998), Julia Gregson's The Water Horse (2004) and Katharine McMahon's The Rose of Sebastopol (2007), with reference to the commonly established view of this historical event. The novels foreground the experience of civilians who found themselves on the periphery of the battlefields, caring for the casualties of the war. As the course of history and private lives intersect, the main characters undergo a personal transformation; for the female protagonists, the experience leads to liberation from conventional gender roles. It is argued that by focusing on civilians rather than soldiers the novels offer a new perspective on the war; nonetheless, they uphold its overwhelmingly negative image in British collective memory.

Housing the past: Victorian houses in neo - Victorian fiction

As argued, among others, by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958), a house which has been inhabited over a period of time becomes a composite of its physical structure and the mental space created by its residents’ thoughts, dreams and memories. This article analyses two contemporary novels in which houses as tangible manifestations of temporally remote experience provide a link to the Vic-torian past. Lauren Willig’s That Summer (2014) and Kate Beaufoy’s Another Heartbeat in the House (2015) represent the same type of neo-Victorian fiction: their plots are composed of two strands, one set in the modern age and the other in the nineteenth century, and in the course of each story parallels and conver-gences are revealed between the two ages and the two casts of characters. The article argues that both novels are also typical “romances of the archive” – as defined by Suzanne Keen (2001) − in which the ma-terial legacy of the past triggers a personally motivated inquiry, leading contemporary characters to un-cover certain bygone mysteries, and, crucially, to recognise the past’s continuing appeal and relevance.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’sHis Bloody Projectand Ian McGuire’sThe North Water

AbstractThe neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

Pandemic Consciousness and Narrative Perspective in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger

Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.

Bakhtin’s Dialogism, Intertextual Theories and Neo-Victorian Fiction

<p>Celem artykułu jest omówienie podejścia do intertekstualności w świetle zainteresowania literaturą neowiktoriańską. Szczególna uwaga poświęcona zostaje pojęciu dialogiczności Michaiła Bachtina oraz teorii intertekstualności Gérarda Genette’a, która wydaje się najbardziej odpowiednim narzędziem do studiowania relacji między tekstami wiktoriańskimi i neowiktoriańskimi, oferując stabilną klasyfikację tekstów opartą na pojęciu „architekstualnej sieci” i nie ograniczając jej do „zamkniętego systemu”. Omawiając zagadnienie intertekstualności, zwracam również uwagę na wkład polskich naukowców, takich jak: Michał Głowiński, Ryszard Nycz czy Henryk Markiewicz. Wśród polskich badań nad intertekstualnością szczególnie wyróżniam teorię Ryszarda Nycza, która skupia się na trzech relacjach: „tekst–tekst”, „tekst–gatunek” oraz „tekst–rzeczywistość”. Propozycja Nycza wydaje się najwłaściwsza w studiuowaniu powieści wiktoriańskich i neowiktoriańskich, jako że umożliwia ich analizę nie tylko na poziomie tekstowym, ale również gatunkowym i kulturowym. Wydaje się, iż literatura neowiktoriańska zdecydowanie zasługuje na zainteresowanie współczesnych studiów literackich, jako że nie tylko ukazuje literacką wizję wiktoriańskiego świata, lecz weryfikuje także obecne społeczno-kulturowe obrazowanie tejże przeszłości, oferując tym samym komentarz dotyczący współczesności.</p>

"An Unusual, Trusting Sort of Girl": Queering Compulsory Able-Mindedness in Neo-Victorian Fiction

"An Unusual, Trusting Sort of Girl": Queering Compulsory Able-Mindedness in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Sensoriality and Hair Jewellery in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Culture

In this essay I will focus on the role played by hair jewellery, a widespread craft in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American context, in neo-Victorian literature and culture. I will consider hair jewels as objects that are remnants of the Victorian past, but also as personal items that evoke affective responses through the senses. In this take on (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, I will consider the entanglement of subjects and objects, human remains (hair) and jewels, past and present, death and life in contemporary renditions of the Victorian craftwork of hair jewellery. Finally, I will argue that this fictionalisation of Victorian material traces allows us to mediate on the links and associations between the Victorian past and our (sensorial) responses to them, and that it opens up the ways to interrogate the affective relations between subjects and objects, the past and the present, then and now, as well as their impact upon our future.

“Doomed to a kind of double consciousness”: treacherous hospitality and the inversion of tradition in A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia”

ABSTRACT A.S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia” marks a significant moment in the consideration of (narrative) hospitality in neo-Victorian fiction. It expands on the concerns of neo-Victorianism by foregrounding the theme of hospitality in discourses that are central to the Victorian novel and to contemporary re-interpretations of Victorian culture. Among these are the trope of the visit to the family house in the English novel, in which guests are often then assimilated into the family, and the perils and threats to personal identity that come with the crossing of the threshold of hospitality. A third is the relationship with the ‘other’ in the un/conditional hospitality that is experienced by the protagonist. All of these sub-themes are contained in an epistemological dimension defined by science and religion, problematically interrelated at the time. This article thus considers the conceptual standpoint and the narrative strategies with which Byatt engages with the literary tradition of hospitality, from Homeric parallels through the nineteenth-century novel’s interest in self-identity, to the implications of the limits of knowledge and recognition of otherness. It also assesses the novella’s neo-Victorianism as a literary reimagining of the nineteenth-century world and examines its receptiveness to a post-structuralist questioning of traditional notions of hospitality.

The White Album as Neo-Victorian Fiction of Loss

AbstractWhile much has been written about Sgt. Pepper's celebration of high Victorian culture, little scholarship, if any, has focused on the White Album's relationship to the late Victorian period. This paper examines The Beatles through the lens of what Victorian studies scholar Stephen Arata has called “fictions of loss,” a body of fin de siècle texts depicting intertwined processes of “national, biological, [and] aesthetic” decline. I argue that the White Album can be read alongside Dracula and She as a “fiction of loss,” revealing the degree to which a sense of “irretrievable decline” returned to haunt Britain in the late Sixties. Indeed, decline and fall comprise one of The Beatles's major concerns, not only because the album documents the band's nascent breakup, but also because it finds the band addressing (and often satirizing) a constellation of fin de siècle themes, newly relevant at midcentury: fears of reverse colonization (“Back In The USSR”); half-ironic fascination with colonial adventurism and “Eastern” enlightenment as correctives to decline (“The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Dear Prudence”); Decadent critiques of over-interpretation (“Glass Onion”); nightmares/fantasies of apocalyptic destruction (“Helter Skelter,” “Revolution 9”), and representations of animal bodies (“Piggies,” “Yer Blues”). If Sgt. Pepper consciously invoked Victorian nostalgia, the White Album evokes fin de siècle motifs unconsciously, responding to their resurgence in the Beatles' time.

Indispensable Redundancy: The Poetic Abscesses of A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990)

ABSTRACT Indulging the impulse to bypass the poems featured in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, this essay explores the ramifications of their integration into the novel beyond the obvious analysis of their content. Starting from the grounds on which readers and critics reject the poems, namely from their designation as paratextual elements and instances of pastiche respectively, it goes on to argue that their creators’ views verify the poems’ value as insightful indicators of the novel’s neo-Victorian quality. However, since the establishment of such a characteristic cannot be easily liberated from questions of originality and authenticity, this essay also proposes an appreciation of the poems through the lens of simulation, which allows them to be approached as self-standing artistic occurrences, proposing, thus, constructive ways of reading neo-Victorian fiction.

Ghostly Gloves, Haunted Hands: The Material Trace in Sarah Waters'sAffinityandFingersmith

Drawing on existing work on the theoretical notion of the trace in neo-Victorian fiction, this article foregrounds the material trace as an appropriate framework for examining neo-Victorian gloves. Considering the ways in which gloves take on a ghostly life and agency of their own in neo-Victorianism, this article seeks to interrogate the material and spectral traces that they leave behind in Sarah Waters's Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002). It aims to show the significance of sartorial matters in these contemporary re-imaginings of the Victorian period, and to examine neo-Victorian fiction's relationship with the traces and fingerprints of the past. Locating the glove as entrenched within cultural memory as an explicitly Victorian item, this article suggests that it acts as both a marker of Victorian situatedness and a palpable entity capable of transgressing the temporal, spatial, and sexual boundaries that exist between the past and present.

Faded Ink: The Material Trace of Handwriting in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Neo-Victorian novelists reimagine handwritten documents to feed contemporary nostalgia for the materiality of handwriting. Handwriting signifies the personal and the private in ways that seem threatened in a digital age. Writers like Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Carey map material pathways to the nineteenth century with fictional characters who strive to possess the written past. Archival fantasies are simulated by novelists depicting writing processes and subsequent discovery and rereading of the handwritten trace by later generations. Imagined scenes of reading and writing describe tactile traces of handwriting that stage possession of the Victorian body in fragmented and partially recoverable states. Resurrection of the desired Victorian body through a metonymical relationship of hand/handwriting evokes a sense of a partial past recovered and experienced. Part of the aestheticism of the past relies on the aura of documents worn to a trace to evidence time and decay. Discovering the handwritten trace in this way becomes a sensory experience for readers and descriptions of decayed materiality emphasise survival for imagined fragments. Contemporary writing thus reveals a dual purpose to aestheticise the material past whilst demonstrating a postmodern drive to refute closure and ultimately celebrate the indeterminate facets of the handwritten trace.

Neo historical fiction: David Mitchell’s take on adventure, empire and the exoticization of the past

This essay is concerned with a new conception of historical fiction that emerged in the British literary scene at the turn of the 21st century, and which Elodie Rousselot has termed neo-historical, having developed on premises similar to neo-Victorian fiction. This variety embraces a narrative realist mode and participates in the taste for popular engagement in public history. The analysis departs from a consideration of the implications of these critical approaches to historical fiction, in as much as they move backwards, beyond their postmodern foundations, and intersect with the genre of historical romance. This article uses David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet(2010) as a case-study in the light of Mitchell’s own conceptualization of the genre of historical fiction. The novel combines a meta-realist approach with the exoticisation of the past and the exploration fictional subjectivities and an awareness of post-imperialist concerns in a globalized world.