Overview

This handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors’ life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives—from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness—in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.  

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9783031321627

Table of Contents

Reviews

“The introduction provides a distinctive history of the term ‘neo-Victorian’ and explores the uses, app … . The themes and texts explored are many and diverse. This is a substantial book … . All of these and many more offer a great deal of thought-provoking explorations of how we rewrite the nineteenth century, but there are, of course, too many for me to explore them all in detail.” (Serena Trowbridge, PRS, Pre-Raphaelite Society Review, 2024) 

Author Information

Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, Canada. Brenda Ayres teaches online courses for Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire University, USA. Maier and Ayres have coedited several collections of essays. The most recent are Neo-Victorian Things (2022), Neo-Disneyism (2022), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2022), The Theological Dickens (2022), A Vindication of the Redhead (2021), Neo-Victorian Madness (2020) Neo-Gothic Narratives: (2020), Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019), and Reinventing Marie Corelli (2019).  

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