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This book broadens the scope of inquiry of neo-Victorian studies by focusing primarily on screen adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture. More specifically, this monograph spotlights the overlapping yet often conflicting drives at work in representations of Victorian heroines in contemporary film and TV. Primorac’s close analyses of screen representations of Victorian women pay special attention to the use of costume and clothes, revealing the tensions between diverse theoretical interventions and generic (often market-oriented) demands. The author elucidates the push and pull between postcolonial critique and nostalgic, often Orientalist spectacle; between feminist textual interventions and postfeminist media images. Furthermore, this book examines neo-Victorianism’s relationship with postfeminist media culture and offers an analysis of the politics behind onscreen treatment of Victorian gender roles, family structures, sexuality, and colonial space.
Childhood in neo-Victorian fiction for both child and adult readers is an extremely multifaceted and fascinating field. This book argues that neo-Victorian fiction projects multiple, competing visions of childhood and suggests that they can be analysed by means of a typology, the 'childhood scale', which provides different categories along the lines of power relations, and literary possible-worlds theory. The usefulness of both is exemplified by detailed discussions of Philippa Pearce's "Tom's Midnight Garden" (1958), Eva Ibbotson's "Journey to the River Sea" (2001), Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith" (2002) and Dianne Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" (2006).
The rise of YA dystopian literature has seen an explosion of female protagonists who are stirring young people's interest in social and political topics, awakening their civic imagination, and inspiring them to work for change. These "Girls on Fire" are intersectional and multidimensional characters. They are leaders in their communities and they challenge injustice and limited representations. The Girl on Fire fights for herself and for those who are oppressed, voiceless, or powerless. She is the hope for our shared future. This collection of new essays brings together teachers and students from a variety of educational contexts to explore how to harness the cultural power of the Girl on Fire as we educate real-world students. Each essay provides both theoretical foundations as well as practical, hands-on teaching tools that can be used with diverse groups of students, in formal as well as informal educational settings. This volume challenges readers to realize the symbolic power the Girl on Fire has to raise consciousness and inform action and to keep that fire burning.
This handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors’ life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives—from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness—in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.
This book addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. A rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status, and the ways of seeing that it generated, helps reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the construction of individual, national and imperial identities. This book is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multi-discursive evocations of syphilis. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture.
This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the “bride” of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters. Hear the authors talk about the collection here: https://nrftsjournal.org/monsters-all-are-we-not-an-interview-with-julie-grossman-and-will-scheibel/
Tracing the genre through fiction, visual art, film and videogames from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between neo-Victorianism, urban spaces and Steampunk. Characterised by its interplay between past and present and its anachronistic retro-speculation, Neo-Victorian-infused Steampunk remixes modern collective memory to produce a re-imagined vision of Victorian London. Investigating how Steampunk's re-calibrated Londons both source from and subvert Victorian discourse about the city, Steampunk London offers a deeper understanding of how a popular cultural memory of the Victorian past is shaped and transmitted in light of present-day...
Written as a Festschrift honouring a beloved professor, colleague, and friend, this volume comprises a collection of essays offering a wide array of contemporary approaches to literature, linguistics, and applied linguistics. It covers a variety of topics, ranging from medieval to contemporary literature and language, and explores genres as diverse as fantasy, dystopia, drama, poetry, and film, addressing issues such as post- and transhumanism, age, gender, identity, family, metonymy, and narrative discourse. The diversity of themes and methodologies here makes the collection a widely applicable resource in the academic discussion of literature, language, and culture, both as a significant contribution to different philological fields and a useful educational tool for anyone teaching or studying English, Anglophone literature, British, American, and German studies, English as a Second Language, linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and applied linguistics, or conducting research in these fields.
Focus on young adult literature - This focus on young adult literature means that this book expands scholarship specifically in this area. Focus on the Gothic for young people – Gothic texts are very popular in children’s and young adult literature, but there hasn’t been a lot of scholarship on the Gothic for adolescents. This book expands our knowledge of how the Gothic intersects with young adult literature. Includes coverage of YA fiction from the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a range of genres that intersect with the Gothic (including historical fiction and fairy tale), as well as forms such as the short story and graphic novel.
This volume highlights humour’s crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour’s politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective s...