Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 10
Acknowledgements......Page 11
Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Post-Authenticity: On the Ethics and Aesthetics of Appropriation......Page 14
1 History, literature, and criticism......Page 21
2 Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the twenty-first century......Page 41
3 Going forward, looking backward......Page 45
1 Memory, Mourning, Misfortune: Ancestral Houses and (Literary) Inheritances......Page 46
1.1 Meta-morphoses: Classical, (early)modern, and neo-Victorian echoes in Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005)......Page 50
1.2 ‘My mother not my mother; myself not myself’: The mother (as) text in Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000)......Page 54
1.3 ‘Tell me the truth’: Trauma, witnessing, and authorship in Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006)......Page 60
1.4 ‘There was something unheimlich about it’: Familial/textual legacies and spectral returns in John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004)......Page 68
1.5 Conclusion......Page 76
2 Race and Empire: Postcolonial Neo-Victorians......Page 79
2.1 Hybridity and resistance in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008)......Page 83
2.2 Voices across borders: Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008)......Page 94
2.3 Orientalism and transculturalism: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999) and Kate Pullinger’s The Mistress of Nothing (2009)......Page 104
2.4 Conclusion......Page 117
3 Sex and Science: Bodily and Textual (Re)Inscriptions......Page 119
3.1 Scopophilia and paratextuality......Page 123
3.2 Subaltern subversions: Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006)......Page 129
3.3 Race, science, and the gaze: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003)......Page 133
3.4 Reclaiming the (textual) body: Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006)......Page 144
3.5 Conclusion......Page 153
4 Spectrality and S(p)ecularity: Some Reflections in the Glass......Page 156
4.1 ‘[L]ights and shadows moving on the inside of the windows’: Charles Palliser’s The Unburied (1999) and Jem Poster’s Courting Shadows (2002)......Page 163
4.2 ‘When Alice stepped through liquid glass’: A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009)......Page 169
4.3 ‘A pure-Victorian half-made window’: Rachel Hore’s The Glass Painter’s Daughter (2008)......Page 176
4.4 ‘[T]here may be some truth in those tales’: John Harwood’s The Séance (2008)......Page 180
4.5 Conclusion......Page 185
5 Doing It with Mirrors, or Tricks of the Trade: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic......Page 187
5.1 ‘Are you watching closely?’: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006)......Page 191
5.2 The conjuror in the closet: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999)......Page 197
5.3 Simulation and consciousness: Mind travel in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006)......Page 203
5.4 Death, resurrection, and cinematography in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) and Steven Millhauser’s ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990)......Page 214
5.5 Conclusion......Page 222
6 The Way We Adapt Now: or, the Neo-Victorian Theme Park......Page 224
6.1 Victoriana World: TV, theme parks, and the object of authenticity......Page 226
6.2 ‘Memory fatigue’: The great (neo-)Victorian collection......Page 233
6.3 From Lark Rise to Cranford and back again......Page 239
6.4 ‘I’m not sure how much of a Dickensian I am really’: The adaptive affinities of Andrew Davies......Page 249
6.5 Conclusion......Page 257
Notes......Page 259
Bibliography......Page 301
Index......Page 324