Neo-Victorianism

Victorian London, Victorian fashion & interior design, the Victorians’ presumed conservatism, and the repercussions of British colonialism are still important elements of contemporary attempts to make sense of what it means to be British (or English). It is therefore no surprise that neo-Victorianism has become an established field in contemporary literary and cultural studies. The texts we will discuss in this class – four novels and a play – were written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but are set in the nineteenth century and at times also imitate a nineteenth-century style of writing. Some of them are based on ‘real’ Victorians (Henry James in Tóibín’s The Master, Queen Victoria I in Gupta’s The Empress) or rewrite nineteenth-century classics (Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, one of the first neo-Victorian texts, is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre); and some of them spin their own tales (Waters’s Affinity and Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage). Most of them are decidedly ambivalent about Victorian mentalities and traditions despite the recognition that readers often wish to immerse themselves in a past they celebrate as nostalgic. The novels we will read cover diverse aspects: we will talk about rewriting, historiographic metafiction, mediums and spiritualism, (neo-)Victorian biography, pornography, and Empire. And if you cannot get enough, you can read Nisi Shawls steampunk Everfair for two bookclub-style meetings.