Neo-Victorianism

de Ann Heilmann

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.