Overview

Fiction classified as ‘neo-Victorian’ has steadily emerged as a crucial mode of British cultural production. It is no coincidence that this most recent Victorian renaissance is taking shape in a climate of widespread empire nostalgia, with imperial-colonial legacies being relegated to a distant ‘elsewhere.’ In its critical re-visitations of the nineteenth century, neo-Victorianism has the potential to intervene in this often selective memory of Britain’s imperial past. Nevertheless, systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate. This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British ‘centres’ in opposition to remote imperial ‘margins.’ It examines why domesticity – broadly understood as ideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations of gender, sexuality, and class – can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism’s larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.

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9783031851704

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Marlena Tronicke is Senior Lecturer in British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her main areas of research and teaching include (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, early modern and contemporary British drama, gender and queer studies, as well as adaptation. Her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter, was published in 2018. She is co-editor of Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains (special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020, with Caroline Koegler and Pavan Malreddy), Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters (special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 2020, with Caroline Koegler), and the edited collection Black Neo-Victoriana (2021, with Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Julian Wacker).

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