Neo-Victorianism

This field-defining book offers an extensive interpretation of the most recent, millennial and especially postmillennial figurations of neo-Victorianism published over the last ten years (1999-2009) through a range of critical and cultural viewpoints, while at the same time highlighting the problematic nature of this 'new' genre and its relationship to re-interpretative critical perspectives on the nineteenth century. In its focus on a series of literary-interpretive encounters with the Victorians (and, to a lesser extent, the earlier nineteenth-century period) coupled with a concluding chapter on neo-Victorianism in the wider nostalgic/heritage marketplace, this book provides new insights into the powerful aesthetic, cultural, and metafictional potential of neo-Victorianism while exploring how those possibilities have been employed since the millennium. The six chapters explore questions of aesthetics and ethics; memory, trauma, and inheritance; postcolonialism; sex and science; spectrality and secularity; (neo- )Victorian magic and metatextuality; and adaptation.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.