Neo-Victorian Fiction Research Articles

Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets

Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets

"[T]he Ghost of Myself": Women, Art, and (Neo-) Sensational Representation in Joanne Harris's Sleep, Pale Sister

Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994) is one of a growing number of neo-Victorian texts to foreground a concern with the female body and the male artist. Such tropes are reminiscent of the Victorian sensation novel, and indeed Harris’s text draws heavily on the plot of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Through an exploration of Harris’s novel, this article considers the role of the female body as objet d’art in neo-sensation fiction, contending that the artistic process represented provides a telling metaphor for the rewriting of the past in historical, and, more specifically, neo-Victorian fiction. I begin by examining the influence of Victorian sensation fiction on neo-Victorian writing, before exploring the representation of artists and their models in the two genres. I consider the extent to which Harris’s novel seeks to revise the power relations inherent in this relationship and empower the heroine, and the implications of this for the metaphor of creativity that emerges from a reading of the text.

Marie-Luise, Kohlke, and Christian

This is the first volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben: twelve essays about 30 pages each (412 p.), in three parts—Crises of faith, Identity, Sexuality; Crises of Truth and Memory; Crises of Nationhood, Empire and Afterimages—with separate bibliographies and general index; a highly rewarding and enlightening ensemble that, beyond the varied cases investigated, will interest researchers and students in both fields of neo-Victorian fiction ...

The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction

Dickens is a prominent figure in neo-Victorian fiction. Indeed, ‘neo-Dickensian’ features as a sub-category of the neo-Victorian output and largely contributes to the so-called ‘Dickens Afterlife.’ Yet, studies of contemporary fictions overly drawing from Dickens’s works have so far been piecemeal as there has not been any attempt to address Dickensian rewritings from a wide, comprehensive perspective. It is our purpose in this paper to try to sketch out a few directions to (hopefully?) initiate an in-depth reflection on Dickens’s reception in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century from a sample of texts revisiting, recycling, ‘reprising’ or deconstructing their Dickensian hypotexts. This article draws from Jay Clayton’s study on Dickens and postmodernism to track down different contemporary responses from Kathy Acker to Sarah Waters and the Antipodean rewritings of both Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip.

<em>Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us</em>, by Louisa Hadley<br/><em>History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages</em>, by Kate Mitchell

<em>Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us</em>, by Louisa Hadley<br/><em>History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages</em>, by Kate Mitchell

<em>Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past</em>, edited by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham<br/><em>Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen</em>, by Diane F. Sadoff

Reviewed by: Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, and: Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen Susan Zieger (bio) Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, edited by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham; pp. xxvi + 197. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £50.00, $80.00. Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen, by Diane F. Sadoff; pp. xxii + 329. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, $75.00, $25.00 paper, £56.00, £18.50 paper. The recently recognized neo-Victorian genre—fiction written since about 1970 and set in the Victorian period—tends to generate the critical comment that the desire for the nineteenth-century past is an ambivalent one. This observation is made often by essays included in Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, some of which dissent from the seeming confidence of the subtitle by noting that the past eludes complete possession. They detect this historical sensitivity in producers and consumers of neo-Victorian fiction, too: although readers wish to lose themselves in an absorptive experience of the Victorian past, writers help attune them to its discursive construction in the present. Mark Llewellyn makes an elegant version of this claim in his essay on novels by John Harwood, Charles Palliser, Jem Poster, and Sarah Waters. He remarks that neo-Victorian writers have begun to realize "that their publications are the equivalent now of the séances and communications with the dead then" (42). Llewellyn's analogy construes the neo-Victorian novel and Victorian séance as indeterminate mixtures of faith and knowledge, lending dignity to Victorian spiritualists and contemporary readers alike. As with a specter, the past can only be glimpsed from the present. That is the common theme running through the essays; its critical simplicity—the sign of a new field defining its boundaries—is often refreshing. The more interesting parts of Llewelyn's essay, and of the volume as a whole, nonetheless, deliver critical insights beyond restatements of the field's founding problematic. Although the collection is subdivided into four sections of two essays each, "Histories and Hauntings," "Spectral Women," "Sensing the Past," and "Ghosts in the City," the essays speak to each other across these categories. I particularly admire Silvana Collela's essay on "Olfactory Ghosts" in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), which links the history of smell to Faber's postrealist critique of "the deodorizing project of nineteenth-century civilization" (89). Rosario Arias takes up a similar theme in her readings of representations of river stink in Matthew Kneale's Sweet Thames (1992) and Clare Clark's The Great Stink (2005). With similar critical sophistication, Esther Saxey's contribution explains how Mary Reilly (1990) and Alias Grace (1996) both engage and frustrate readers' desire to liberate Victorian women [End Page 378] from sexual oppression through their acts of reading. And in a complexly layered reading of Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), Patricia Pulham uses the myth of the Golem to analyze the novels' engagements with the Ripper and Ratcliffe Highway murders, as well as their connection to the Jewish history of the East End. All of the essays give fine close readings of novels, so the collection would admirably service an undergraduate course on neo-Victorian fiction. And yet the concept-metaphor of "haunting and spectrality" also tends to limit the book's critical scope, hampering some specific analyses of readers' demands for neo-Victorian fiction and precluding a generalized explanation of its recent enlarged appeal. By occasionally leading essayists to emphasize the elusiveness of the past, and to assume a compulsion to apprehend it, the haunting metaphor rhetorically conjures present-day writers, readers, and critics as an undifferentiated "we" whose Victorian desire is largely the same. If neo-Victorian fiction insidiously deploys the trope of haunting to achieve this illusion of cultural homogeneity, critics should focus on explaining why rather than rein-scribing that ideological effect. Otherwise, in the absence of more specific critical discussion, the haunted seem to have no particular racial, postcolonial, neoliberal, or other identifications and investments that...

Mary Reilly as Jekyll or Hyde : Neo-Victorian (re)creations of Feminity and Feminism

In his article “What is Neo-Victorian Studies?” (2008), Mark Lewellyn argues that the term neo-Victorian fiction refers to works that are consciously set in the Victorian period, but introduce representations of marginalised voices, new histories of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian era. Valerie Martin’s gothic-romance Mary Reilly drew on Stevenson’s novella to introduce a woman’s perspective on the puzzle of Jekyll and Hyde. Almost twenty-years after the publication of Martin’s novel, the newly established field of research in Neo-Victorian fiction has questioned the extent to which Neo-Victorian recreations of the Victorian past respond to postmodern contemporary reflections and ideas about the period. This article aims to examine the ways in which this Neo-Victorian gothic text addresses both the issues of Victorian femininity and feminist principles now in the light of later Neo-Victorian precepts, taking into consideration that Martin’s novel introduces a woman’s perspective as a feminist response to Stevenson’s text but also includes many allusions to the cult of domesticity as a legacy of the Victorian gothic romance.