Neo-Victorian Literature

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Aboriginal dispossession and destruction upon which Australia is founded, situating its reader complexly, as both witness to and complicit in the events it retells. Her use of fiction to represent this trauma made Grenville the focus of heated public debate about the role of fiction in representing the past, a debate that repeatedly cast her project as historically dubious. However, rather than approaching the novel as a corrupted form of history’s reconstruction of past events, it seems more useful to situate this text as an act of memory in the present, which shapes both past and future. Even as it represents the past, Grenville’s novel addresses a present both deeply divided and in danger of forgetting its history. It uses the affective power of fiction to reinscribe and reactivate Aboriginal Australian history in the contemporary historical imaginary.

A psychoanalyst and a detective share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection. Yet, what is also apparent in these novels is a certain degree of anachronism: what we know about forensic psychiatry today is applied to fin de siècle contexts. The chapter provides a discussion of three texts—Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1995), Frank Tallis’s Mortal Mischief (2005), and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006)—focusing on the figures of psychiatrist detectives who represent an anachronistic antipatriarchal and egalitarian perspective on the marginalised and impoverished classes in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society.

The omnipresence of Neo-Victorian productions on our screens, from Ripper Street (2012-2016) to Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), suggests that we may be intense consumers of the Victorians, more precisely, of the elements in them most likely to be felt by us as alien. The Gothic dimension of many of these productions constructs the Victorians as our new Orient, in an act of “Victorientalism” (Kohlke, 2008). What does account for the appeal the Victorians have on us? As Marie-Luise Kohlke recalls, 21st century spectators seem to relish seeing “the Victorians suffer and die for us on screen” (Kohlke, 2008, 190), and experience Neo-Victorian unhomeliness “via remote control”, from the comfort of modern homes. The emphasis in Neo-Victorian works on slums or on marginal characters whose voices were hardly audible in Victorian works, hints at an interesting ethical dimension, not dissimilar to postcolonial ethics. Yet, suspicion lies on 21st century spectators of Neo-Victorian series who are also given to practise virtual slumming, watch and consume the spectacle of poverty, prostitution, and industrial labour in 19th-century England, being thus turned into modern-day voyeurs.
Still, one may wonder if, instead of being the consumers of the Victorians, we may not be the ones being consumed by the Victorians. Along with Victorian economies of consumption – serialised fiction, penny dreadfuls, etc. –  and the historical correlation between Victorianism, Empire and capitalism, one may ask whether 21st century spectators are not subject to a process of Neo-Victorian colonisation of global cultural productions. This occupation of media space by Neo-Victorian imagery – which assimilates Jane Austen, the Brontës and Bram Stoker under the banner of the “long 19th century” and could be seen as a form of Neo-Victorian global, visual imperialism - needs to be analysed and its ideological underpinnings, questioned. Finally, this paper will call for ethical consumption of Neo-Victorian works

A hallmark of neo-Victorian fiction is its preoccupation with recovering and reimagining lost voices from the past. The increased critical attention toward feminist neo-Victorian fiction in the late 1990s and early 2000s fuelled an ongoing debate about the genre’s capacity to redress historical silences toward marginalised groups. The representation of women in neo-Victorian fiction has divided critics: on the one hand, these novels are viewed as key interventions in contemporary gender inequality and, on the other, as opportunistic works designed to capitalise on the fetishisation of the Other. Despite the recurring presence of transgressive female bodies in Graham Swift’s neo-Victorian novel Waterland (1983), criticism of the novel has thus far neglected to engage with its relationship to the feminist movement in the genre. The majority of scholarship on the novel focuses on Tom Crick’s narrative as a prime example of postmodern historiography or historiographic metafiction. As a result, little attention has been paid to the female characters in Waterland, while the scholarship that does exist in this area perpetuates the perception of these women as powerless pawns in the grand narrative of male-authored history. This paper addresses the critical silence toward Waterland’s female characters by employing an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from memory studies, corporeal feminism, and neo-Victorian criticism. I argue that repositioning our attention from memory-as-story to memory-as-body reveals the agency inherent in the actions of Waterland’s women, particularly with regard to Crick’s wife Mary and her Victorian-era counterpart, Sarah Atkinson. Reading the novel through the embodied memories of its female characters demonstrates their capacity to successfully intervene in the patriarchal discourse that seeks to overpower them.

Scores of authors, directors and digital producers have adapted, revised and modernised Charlotte Brontë's most famous novel, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847). As Antonija Primorac notes, neo-Victorianism is "a powerful trend in contemporary Anglophone media" pointing to the "continuous production of adaptations and appropriations of Victorian literature and culture" (2017, 452). These ubiquitous transformations of Jane Eyre reveal transtexual 1 parallels between nineteenth-and twentyfirst-century life, including the ways in which women with substance use disorders are understood to be mad-so mad, in fact, that the community's future happiness depends on the addicted female character's death. 2 In Sean and Sinead Persaud's web series Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party, the character "Charlotte Brontë" colludes in a scheme to murder a slew of authors in order to cover up that her sister killed Jane Austen for threatening to expose their brother Branwell's misdeeds. At first glance, this version of Brontë seems absurdly inaccurate for the sake of comedy. She is too sardonic, too vindictive and

Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999), set during the height of Victorian Spiritualism, consciously plays with Victorian truisms to subvert our expectations of class and gender roles, and retrospectively explore Victorian taboos of female power and sexuality. Lower class Selina Dawes and Ruth Vigers take advantage of the relatively liberal space of the seance to make 'unnatural' border crossings, using the archetype of the Victorian 'Angel' to hide their 'Monstrosity.' This paper argues that the  Mermaid is a useful image for re-examining placed on women by men in that era. As a contemporary female writer, Waters subverts these normative models, and in doing so reveals the complexity and hidden talents of women who, in their own time, were unable to outwardly voice their desires, or actively seek power.

This essay explores the field of transnational neo-Victorian studies, arguing that "transnational" does not so much signal a subcategory of the discipline of Victorian or neo-Victorian studies as it does a recalibra-tion of one's instruments of analysis and of one's position within a vast constellation of cultural producers and consumers, both within and without the academy. Transnational neo-Victorian studies requires recognizing the value of what literary critic Juliet John has called "undisciplined knowledge." It requires, moreover, a collaborative and tentative ethos that is often at odds with the structural realities of the academy. This essay first glosses some of the salient discussions around the terms "Victorian," "neo-Victorian," and "transnational" before turning to an example of a transnational neo-Victorian text, Japanese manga Kuroshitsuji (黒執事; 2007-) by Toboso Yana (枢やな), and its representation of a Chinese opium den in London's East End, in order to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of the discipline.

Possession: A Romance is a novel by British writer A.S.Byatt that narrates the love story of two Victorian poets and two modern-day scholars, through constant back-and-forth in time. In 1986, the scholar Roland Michell finds two letters that the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash has written to an unnamed woman. Having studied Ash thoroughly, Roland is intrigued and comes up with a theory that the letters are addressed to Christabel LaMotte, another Victorian poet who has only recently become known because of feminist literature studies. Roland meets Maud Bailey, whose studies concern LaMotte. Both these characters are absorbed into the mystery and intrigue of the love story between the two Victorian poets. Meanwhile, other scholars such as Leonora Stern, James Blackadder and Mortimer Cropper are also scrupulously looking for more information regarding either Ash or LaMotte.

This paper undertakes the examination of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) and Sarah Waters's Affinity (1999) by focusing on the theme of spiritualism and mesmerism in each of the texts and what that reveals about the role of women in Victorian society and its literary representation in neo-Victorian fiction. It will be argued that this engagement with the occult can be understood as a metaphor for the postmodern idea of resurrecting Victorian concerns in what appears to be a literary subset of the neo-Victorian novel, the spectral novel, a textual space for fictionalising what is absent from historical record and for making the dead speak in manifold ways. In this sense, Atwood and Waters, who can be considered historians in their archeological project of digging out the past, assume the role of the medium in establishing the dialogue between the past (the world of the dead) and the present (the world of the living).

This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens’s vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations (1998), a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel’s portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham’s clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud.

Both neo-Gothicism and vampirism elide past and present, life and death, and shadow and substance—which last conflation is especially striking in neo-Gothic films and television series about vampires. Like the recorded image of a vampire, the neo-Gothic is a shadow of a shadow. The Gothic and the neo-Gothic tend to merge, rendering the contemporary neo-Gothic work a simulacrum of a simulacrum, positioning its interpreters in a textual mise en abyme, and greatly enhancing its metatextual and intertextual characteristics. Given the compelling parallels between neo-Gothicism and vampirism, neo-Gothic narratives featuring vampires are arguably the richest of all such texts. The shadowy relationship between vampirism and neo-Gothicism is illustrated, with considerable complexity and nuance, by two exemplary neo-Gothic vampire narratives: “A White World Made Red,” an episode of the BBC series Ripper Street (2013–2016), and What We Do in the Shadows (2014), the faux documentary written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi.

This article examines John Harding’s novel Florence & Giles (2010) as a neo-Victorian reworking of Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw (1898). Focussing on the representation of childhood, this article aims to demonstrate that Florence & Giles is the first reworking of The Turn of the Screw that centres entirely on one of the child characters, who is simultaneously its protagonist and narrator. In the larger context of neo-Victorian fiction, which has tended to marginalise child characters, the work is equally progressive. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, the article argues that Harding radicalises the subversion of Victorian childhood innocence which is already implicit in James’s text as it foregrounds various modes of transgression, particularly through its effective employment of voice, space, and agency. Finally, the article intends to show how Florence & Giles intertwines the deconstruction of Victorian ideals of childhood with contemporary discourses on the issue of childhood.

Sound and voice have been invoked in neo-Victorian criticism since its beginning, and we have utilised the notion of the author as medium: for example, the medium’s ability to communicate with the dead has been used as metaphor for the dialogue between past and present, and the author functioning as a medium partaking of the world of the dead and world of the living, thus connecting and embodying the disembodied voices of the dead. However, my interest here lies not only in the voices of the dead, but also in other sound-related phenomena that feature in neo-Victorian novels so as to illustrate that neo-Victorianism impinges on the Victorian duality materiality/immateriality, embodiment/disembodiment, including acoustics. Moreover, I would like to argue that the paradoxical nature of the movement is predicated upon the ambivalent nature of the notion of noise, and that, in a way, neo-Victorianism functions as a noise in that it interrupts our present, and acquires a productive value, following Michel Serres. Therefore, in this paper I will consider neo-Victorianism as a noise, and I will discuss soundscapes and affective sensoriality in a selection of texts. Then, I will argue that a framework of sensoriality, through the evocation of sound, voice and noise, helps us interrogate our interaction with the non-human, and makes us think what it is like to be human today.

Although the Victorians were categorically pioneering in the implication of many radical developments, industrially, socially, and even globally; one area in which variety was rarely seen was in the discourse of sexuality. Critics such as Steven Marcus have acknowledged the existence of sexual ‘others’ within Victorian England, but show how in traditional texts from the period, these ‘others’ have always been enclosed within deviant spaces. (Marcus) Terry Castle, in her insightful and challenging book, The Apparitional Lesbian; discusses the presence of lesbians in literature, and argues that ‘The literary history of lesbianism…is first of all a history of derealization’ (Castle 34). Although Castle shows that female homosexuality does occur in Victorian texts, she also provides evidence that any suggestion of lesbianism had to be ‘derealized’. Over the past twenty years or so, a new form of historical text has emerged, which has come to be known as the Neo-Victorian novel. In these novels, writers have been able to reimagine the nineteenth-century, with the inclusion of previously marginalised ‘otherness’. One of these authors is the critically acclaimed and highly successful novelist; Sarah Waters, and the ‘other Victorians’ that Waters includes in her stories are lesbians. This study will examine Sarah Waters three Neo-Victorian texts; Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, assessing the treatment of both sexuality and gender, and the relationship they have with space. In Tipping the Velvet, the study will look at how the protagonist journeys through a number of different spaces, and assess her sexual development within each space, discussing how theatricality is used to conceal identity. It will also analyse how Waters imagines the male gaze, and look at the treatment of Victorian ideals surrounding masculinity and femininity. In Affinity, the essay will examine the notion of the ‘apparitional lesbian’, and how Waters utilizes this concept to uncover the truths it hides. It will also assess Waters’ use of Bentnam’s panopticon, and the way in which the author portrays the entrapment of the Victorian woman. In Fingersmith, the study will discuss the dubiety of the novel’s spaces and how this is significant to the study of sexuality. It will also show how Waters uses intertextuality to convey her own transgressions. The main point of concern will be to judge just how progressive these novels are in their portrayal of lesbianism, and whether Waters succeeds in finding a conceivable space for lesbians within an authentic historical novel.

This essay argues that the frequency and consistency of Victorian-set or Victorianinfluenced pornographic films highlight hardcore's reliance on class-and gender-related spatial transgression for erotic appeal: boundaries of public and private that the films specifically associate with Victorian social structures. This essay illuminates a self-reflexive pornographic heritage and demonstrates the peculiar tension between sexual repression and sexual perversity evidenced in cultural understandings of both the 19th-century and modern day pornography. I argue that in such films as A Scent of Heather (1980), Memoirs of a Chambermaid (1987), and Victorian Love Letters (2010), 19th-century material culture and technology, including written text, clothing, furniture, and domestic space, are eroticized in pornographic film specifically in connection with gender and class. In so doing, Victorian sexuality is represented in pornography as simultaneously regressive and perverse, as well as intimately tied to the transgression of strict class boundaries; boundaries that, the films seem to suggest, are no longer present in enlightened modern culture.

This chapter analyses the specific way in which Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill in their graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen appropriate Victorian Gothic fiction into a highly elaborate metafictional crossover. Special focus is put on the role of hybridity and otherness, both in the Victorian source material and in the neo-Victorian rewriting , and on the critique of discourses of power.

This masters thesis analyses the work of British writer Sarah Waters, focussing on the inseparability of spatiality and the expression of sexuality in her novels. Since 1998, Waters has published three books set in the mid-to-late Victorian era, featuring lesbian protagonists: Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith. All three novels are examples of lesbian fiction, but they are also arguably works of historiographic metafiction and “post-Victorian” novels. They have been critically and popularly acclaimed, added to university reading lists and adapted for television. There has thus far been a small amount of scholarship in response to Waters’s novels, primarily concerned with generic classification and lesbian identity.

The entwined discourses of space and sexuality form the theoretical basis of this discussion. There is a large body of academic work on this subject, by cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Mark Wigley as well as geographers such as Tim Creswell. Previous studies of Waters’s work have made little use of theories of space and sexuality, despite their relevance to her novels. I draw upon these theories in my analyses of Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith, exploring the way in which the historically transgressive sexualities of Waters’s heroines are constructed spatially, via the characters’ movement (or lack thereof) through confining interiors. 

Chapter One looks at the ways in which theatrical and performative transgressions affect sexual expression in Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet. Sites of performance, or stages, are not only located in theatres in this text, but are present everywhere: on the streets and in the homes of both the rich and poor. Upon these numerous and diverse stages Nancy Astley, the protagonist of the novel, reveals the inherent performativity of gender and sexuality through cross-dressing and impersonation. The second chapter shows the way sexual identities are confined within both the private sphere and the prison in Affinity. The desires of the protagonists can be articulated only through spiritual or ghostly transgressions, which are simultaneously arousing and frightening. The third chapter focuses on domestic spaces and madness in Fingersmith. Waters draws on Victorian notions of hysteria and female sexuality in this novel, re-appropriating them for her own purposes. This thesis concludes that Waters re-presents Victorian sexuality through the spaces in which it was enclosed.

Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.

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.

See www.neovictorianstudies for original; Neo-Victorian Studies 9.2 (2017)

This article seeks to illustrate how cross-dressing functions to highlight not only a crisis of gender identity, as Marjorie Garber describes in Vested Interests (1992), but operates more broadly to indicate multiple and overlapping crises of sexual and racial identity. Using examples from three postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love (1999), Elaine di Rollo's A Proper Education for Girls (2008) and Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing (2009), the article analyses the representation of characters who consciously fail to pass as 'other' when dressing across lines of race and gender. Using a postfeminist framework, the article challenges the assumption that seemingly independent female characters in neo-Victorian fiction automatically contest Victorian stereotypes of accepted female behaviour. Looking at the novels' representations of otherness, the article argues for the existence of a double Orientalism in postcolonial neo-Victorianism: a revived Victorian Orientalism within the texts as well as a renewed twenty-first-century Orientalism constructed between the present-day reader and the modern text itself.

ABSTRACT
The condition-of-England novel is a term traditionally applied to English novels written and published in the 1840s and 1850s. This paper challenges this assumption and shows that this novelistic genre is definitely not limited to this period. Moreover, it is also traditionally thought that these novels addressed the social and economic divisions, which were particularly acute then, and proposed a ‘compromise’ between the conflicting parties, namely the upper, middle and working classes in order to save England’s unity and prevent revolution. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, North and South (1854–55), is one such novel. This paper argues that the same issues inform the underlying themes of E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End (1910) which also offers the same solution.
Likewise, it is traditionally thought that the ‘compromise’ expounded by those nineteenth-century novels was of particular relevance to that period in Victorian England. This paper challenges this assumption too. An examination of Howards End shows first the huge debt, previously unexamined, it owes to North and South and, second, that the settlement still constituted the viable cure for England’s ailments.

This paper examines two novels (Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas) as monstrous Neo-Victorian texts. Both mimic the patchwork nature of many Victorian novels, but are fragmented and self-consciously deformed in a wholly postmodern way. These monstrous texts (which contain examples of monstrosity and trauma on many levels) argue against the assumption that the Victorian era formed a haven of coherence and self-assuredness. In both their form and contents, Poor Things and Cloud Atlas also question the academic process of historical reconstruction and revision. Rather than building on the foundations of the Victorian establishment, I argue that these texts are actively engaged in tearing it down—or more accurately, deconstructing it.

Ultimately, this paper shows how historiographic metafiction (specifically Neo-Victorian fiction) uses trauma to rewrite the past (and sometimes to pre-write the future) in order to validate both the individual and broader cultural present of the reader. Rather than seeking comfort in the completeness of a Victorian past, Neo-Victorian texts like Poor Things and Cloud Atlas find comfort in its illusory nature.

In this thesis I undertake an examination of monsters and the monstrous in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Kohlke and Gutleben situate Neo-Victorian fiction within the field of trauma studies, where the “traumatised subject of modernity pre/rediscovers itself in its manifold nineteenth-century others” (14). This rediscovery helps the postmodern individual come to terms with the traumatic loss of a sense of history and the self in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Kohlke and Gutleben’s argument seems particularly useful when discussing monstrosity in Neo-Victorian literature, because like other works of historical fiction, Neo- Victorian texts “both communicate memory that which is already know[n] through a variety of media about the Victorian era, for example and offer themselves as memory” (K. Mitchell 32). By offering virtual (and often wildly fantastical) visions of the monstrous set in the actual Victorian era, Neo-Victorian fiction potentially renders the 19th century, with all of its accompanying morals, theories, and meta-narratives, equally fantastical to contemporary readers. The question that remains is whether memory is constructed largely from the fragments of a lived past, or whether memory is primarily something we project back onto the past from the present. To what extent do Neo-Victorian texts bring the Victorians to us, and to what extent do they bring aspects of us to the Victorians?

Under the auspices of the project 'Orientation': A Dynamic Perspective of Contemporary Fiction and Culture (1990-onwards) (Ref. FFI2017-86417-P), this Conference explores how the concept of 'orientation' can offer a renewed perspective on literary texts and cultural products alike. By positioning 'orientation' in close relation to (multiple) temporalities (or "polytemporality", following Victoria Browne), space, and recognition of the 'other', this Conference (and the project) addresses the dynamic and fluid nature of today's fiction and culture in English. As Sara Ahmed points out, "[o]rientations are about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach" (56). In this sense, we pose the following: what directions do contemporary texts tend towards? How are these directions configured? How do we make sense of the "things" that are within our reach?

The essay describes how Virginia Woolf freely adopted the genre of the “imaginary portrait” while writing a relatively neglected short story about a female medievalist, ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), and Orlando (1928), the renowned novel dedicated to her lover Vita Sackville-West. Usually remembered for her masterpieces such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931), conveying through a stylistic virtuosity the dilemmas of modern existence, Orlando is usually seen as one of Woolf’s lightest works. The purpose of this analysis is to reconsider the role of history and literary past in the novel, suggesting that Orlando is not only a tribute to Walter Pater but also a ingenious allegory of English literature and culture.

This book focuses on the encounters of literature and visuality in Victorian culture, with a special emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. lt aims at exploring why Pre-Raphaelitism, with its peculiar handling of literature and visuality, has been granted an important position in recent revisions of Victorian culture. Though the answer to that question is far from unequivocal, the visibility of Pre-Raphaelitism in recent revisions of Victorian culture seems to be due to its affinity with the procedures of contemporary critical theory. Both Pre-Raphaelitism and contemporary theory rely on the concept of borderline--be it the borderline between cultures, media, languages, disciplines or psychic structures. The Pre-Raphaelites, with their keen interest in illustration, ekphrasis, transgression, sensuality, nature, history and cultural others, often operate as an alibi of the very interpretive effort invested in the act of reassessing. This proposition works as the structural backbone of my study, which aims to investigate the ways in which the Pre-Raphaelite procedures have retained their functionality in the sphere of culture.

This article explores how The Legend of Hell House (1973), the cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House ([1971] 1999), updates debates and struggles between scientists and spiritualists in the Victorian period, reworking many key themes and even individual personages. It shows that the film exposes the links between understandings of the scientific and the supernatural that underlie their superficial opposition. It also discusses how The Legend of Hell House self-reflexively comments upon the ‘supernaturalization’ of modern media technology and especially the ‘supernatural’ characteristics ascribed to cinema in its first years.

From her first appearance in  The French Lieutenant's Woman,  Sarah is introduced as “the other figure” and depicted more as a bizarre object of observation than a protagonist. In other words,  John Fowles doesn’t provide an accurate description of the character, while he tries to present, from time to time, the impressions Sarah evokes, especially in Charles. My purpose is to underline the essential role of Sarah as a pervasive vision, whose ambiguous eyes guide Charles in the definition of his new self and in the total expression of his “potential” that had been “turned to a fossil”.

Brontë (1818-1848) was a novelist and poet of great power and originality whose work has become canonical in both genres. Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne are unique in the annals of English literature in their status as the only three children from one family who have all achieved greatness in English literature. The Brontë sisters' novels are translated and read globally today, and their home at Haworth Parsonage has become a museum that is visited by many thousands of tourists each year. Emily's only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is one of the most famous and influential in the English language. Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, at Thornton, Yorkshire, to the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife, the former Maria Branwell of Penzance. Patrick was a highly gifted man, a Cambridge-educated Anglican clergyman and poet from humble rural Irish origins. Maria Branwell, a Wesleyan Methodist, was from the middle classes; her father was a successful grocer and tea merchant. From her letters, we know that Maria was a loving, witty woman; the couple were devoted to one another. Emily was the fifth of six children born to Maria and Patrick within less than six years. The children were, in order of their birth: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne. Emily's mother died in pain from stomach cancer on September 15, 1821, when Emily was only three years old. Patrick was now faced with raising six children, the eldest only seven, and the youngest not yet two. After Patrick tried unsuccessfully to remarry, Maria's sister Elizabeth Branwell moved in to help care for the house and children. She would live there until her death; her money enabled her adult nieces Charlotte and Emily to study in Brussels and to publish their poems with Anne's. Her will left just under £300 each to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.

This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens's vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations , a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel's portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham's clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud.

This essay argues that attention to the form of contemporary neo-Victorian manga (Japanese comics) can move us analogically toward a theory of the function of the neo-Victorian in our global-historical context. Through an examination of two neo-Victorian manga that adapt Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic detective Sherlock Holmes -Toboso Yana's Kuroshitsuji (2007-) and Moto Naoko's Dear Holmes (2006-07) -I show how these comics evoke a sense of the uncannily familiar and melancholically lost/not-lost Victorian literary object, literalising what Linda Hutcheon calls the "inherently 'palimpsestuous'" nature of adaptations (Hutcheon 2013: 6). These manga solicit layered, and vexed, attachments from their readers by incorporating textual and graphic allusions to Doyle's Holmes stories and by combining narrative strategies of serial publication (which themselves evoke the Victorian periodical press) with the temporal play afforded by the structure of comics itself. They manifest Thierry Groensteen's description of the "iconic solidarity" of comics, in which "interdependent images […] present the double characteristic of being separated" and, simultaneously, "over-determined by […] their coexistence" in the shared space of the page (Groensteen 2007: 13, 17-18). These manga thus offer meditations on what it means to be part of the longue durée of a global Victorian literary tradition.

This work examines the main female archetypes present in Victorian literature and art, and the social atmosphere that gave them birth in regards to women’s autonomy and freedom. To this extent, the study focuses on a neo-Victorian text, Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). These archetypes are explored from a feminist perspective, analyzing the ways in which the two main female characters represent them, and rebel against them. 

Keywords: Angel in the house, archetype, fallen woman, neo-Victorian, Victorian