Academic Programme/List of Abstracts

Following V.S. Naipaul’s saying “The London I knew or imaginatively possessed was the London I had got from Dickens” (The Enigma of Arrival, 122-23), this paper aims to explore Charles Dickens’ legacy in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) relating it to his Great Expectations (1861) regarding the portrayals of the city of London as well as the protagonists’ expectations of it, and their respective disillusionment. Both novels are examples of bildungsromans whose protagonists are also the narrators offering accounts of their own social and psychological growth in London where they came with great expectations to improve their social, economic and intellectual standards. Nevertheless, these self-depictions turn into turmoil once they arrive to the metropolis, since they can neither make their dreams come true, nor can they go beyond being mimic men. In Pip’s case, his social aspirations to become a gentleman in London leads him to feel disdain towards his own people in the countryside, and in Ralph’s case, he starts feeling shame for his “unreal” and inactive country Trinidad. This shame paves the way for his idealization of the real and active British colonial authority and turns him, too, into a mimic man. Apart from the themes of mimicry and identity crises depicted in the novels, both novels depict the settings in accordance with the dramatic events happening around it. In other words, the constant mist dominating the settings represents protagonists’ ambiguity and confusion with respect to their future life conduct in London. Hence, the aim of this paper is twofold; on the one hand, it seeks to analyze the reasons behind the entailing attitudes of the protagonists in London with the help of socio-cultural orientations of the novels; on the other hand, it endeavors to portray the similarities between the city of London depicted by Dickens and the one pictured by Naipaul to demonstrate Dickens’ literary influence on Naipaul’s fiction.

This paper aims to present a theoretical approach to the concepts of “orientation” and “recognition” as relevant critical terms for illness and disability studies. These two concepts belong to the phenomenological approach to literature by scholars such as Sara Ahmed and Rita Felski, respectively. Simply put, in trying to elucidate the social and cultural mediation of illness narratives, we need to further investigate both the need for re/orientation on the part of the author when confronted with illness or disability, and the need for recognition and acknowledgment of their new realities they demand from readers.As Rosario Arias argues, “orientation” can be understood as influenced by the phenomenological view upon the world in which there is an emphasis on perspectival meaning, and on the direction of objects and bodies in embodied situatedness, particularly in the fields of affect, sensorial materiality, illness and disability studies (unpublished paper). This concept has been developed by Sara Ahmed, who dwells on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and the philosophical debates over the body, and over the senses and perception. Though Ahmed’s main interest is sexual orientation, this concept also offers fresh possibilities to explore a new sense of time and space in the experiences and perceptions of illness and disability. In this critical context, we may argue that the disruptive experience of illness and disability requires radical re-orientation for the authors, both in space and time. As Paul Kalanithi explains in his memoir When Breath Becomes Air (2016), he finds the prospect of facing terminal cancer quite disorienting, even dislocating (148). In a similar vein, Nina Riggs, also with a terminal diagnosis, describes in her memoir The Bright Hour (2017), “the disorienting gap between the expected and the perceived” (103). Moreover, these memoirs are not only tools that help authors navigate through a complex meaning- making process, but also they function as maps that help re/orient other patients through this foreign territory.

On the other hand, illness and disability narratives also readily express the need to be recognised in their own terms by contemporary readers. Rita Felski defines “recognition” as one of the main forms of textual engagement for common readers (together with knowledge, shock and enchantment). Since recognition has a dialogic dimension, it is very intensely anchored in intersubjective relations, considering persons as embedded and embodied agents. As Ricoeur has explained, the concept of recognition goes from identifying something to identifying oneself, to recognizing and being recognized by others (Ricoeur 2005). Therefore, we may see how illness and disability narratives empower their narrators as they project the need for recognition and knowledge instead of the more common reactions of pity or even self-blame (Baena 2017). In conclusion, I am to explore how illness and disability studies may benefit from these “travelling concepts”, in Mieke Bal’s terms, as orientation and recognition help understand the dynamic process of contemporary reading practices, as well as the affective and cognitive impact of these powerful narratives.

Rooted in the atavistic and nebulous mists of folklore, the vampire has always shown its multiform and protean capacity of adaptation to the different events and periods of history. Paradoxically enough, shedding no reflection in the mirror of early literary texts, vampires have become doubles of human fears and anxieties of all times. This talk presents an inclusive overview of how the vampire has evolved from a symbol of monstrosity, horror and sexual polysemic behaviour in the Victorian period to one of present-day decadence and pubescent and puritan love in some significant paradigms of neo-Victorian literature and culture. The origins of the vampire as a literary myth reflecting the uncanny can be traced back to the Romantic period, with the narrative point of departure of John William Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ (1816). James Malcolm Rymer’s ‘Varney the Vampire’ (1837), published in installments at the threshold of the Victorian era, turned the creatures of the night into an emblem of popular culture which would be exploited later, in Victorian sensation narratives, in the symbolic form of elusive and sexually deviant monsters like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The languid decay of the literary vampire in the first part of the twentieth century was counterpointed by the zenith of vampires as cinematic creatures, from Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) to Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), reaching the sexual fetishism of blood in technicolor, incarnated by Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958) and the subsequent Hammer films, all of them enriched by Gothic and neo-Victorian features. The crepuscular tone of Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles” and, to some extent, John Badham’s Dracula (1979), paved the way for the rise of the postmodern and neo-Victorian vampire, portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and, ultimately, in Stephenie Meyer’s “The Twilight Saga” and other popular blockbusters and television series. It is my contention that, in recent times, the vampire has become a “disenchanted image”, an emblem of adolescent and tamed “romantic love” which opposes the powerful figure of ancestral horror and sexual unease revealed by the Victorian vampire.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) can be considered a Victorian epic on the figure of the outsider. Although Brontë’s novel accommodates a variety of characters who certainly classify as outsiders in their own right, one character in particular holds an almost exclusive place in people’s imaginings. Unsurprisingly, it is the character of Heathcliff who has caught the imagination of readers and critics alike for over two centuries. Michael Stewart’s Ill Will (2018) tries to reimagine the unfathomable spaces Heathcliff inhabits when he leaves Wuthering Heights to build his fortune, and the possibility of tracing them in an attempt to comprehend the process of identity shaping of such a character. Heathcliff’s origins and otherness are intertwined with his travelling experience across the North of England, raising questions about the perception of otherness and its emotional impact on the outsider in different places, both physical and psychological. Moreover, the dynamics of Derrida’s hostipitality, present in the antihero’s journey, is definitely linked to the experience of pain and the reshaping of the emotional realities that intersect in the outsider’s perception of the world, as well as to his orientations in relation to the rest of the characters in both Brontë and Stewart’s novels. The aim of the paper is, therefore, to show to which extent this retelling of Heathcliff incorporates contemporary concepts of identity shaping through space and emotion at the same time that it tries to reconcile Heathcliff’s imagined past with Brontë’s novel and its reception nowadays.

Videogames offer a thoroughly different mode of engagement with the nineteenth century to non- interactive texts like films or novels. Players are immersed in the world of a game in a more literal sense because their status as active producers of the narrative, rather than passive recipients (Neitzel, “Narrativity”), lets them truly experience the “sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality […] that takes over […] our whole perceptual apparatus” (Murray 98). Players interact with the virtual space of the game through the avatar, i.e., they do not only possess a point of view but also a point of action (Neitzel, “Point” 10). When related to the identity of the character controlled by the player, like e.g. to their gender, this suggests a framework of delineating agency and gaze.

In my paper, I will look at the (re)negotiation of Victorian gender ideologies in the steampunk videogames Dishonored and Dishonored 2. The first instalment’s only playable character, Corvo, appears to be a prime example of ideal Victorian masculinity – he is “the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender” (Ruskin 121-2) – while his gaze lingers on a number of passive female characters who are either Angels in the House, damsels in distress, or prostitutes. After this imitation of Victorian gender tropes had sparked criticism all around, the developer made it possible to control the female character Emily in the sequel, being committed to revising the depiction of women (Parfitt). My paper will explore how these gendered instances of embodiment in a virtual environment render a distinctly neo-Victorian engagement with nineteenth-century gender ideologies possible.

My paper proposes that an ecocritical approach to studying Neo-Victorianism can bring to the fore an as yet underexamined trend in twenty-first century Neo-Victorian fiction – namely, its ecological concern with the relationship between human beings and the natural world in a broadly colonial context and its articulation of how that relationship is based on the viability or otherwise of community. Critical attention to the environmental dimension of Neo-Victorian texts would also reorient the academic practice of Neo-Victorianism towards engaging with the threats to the planet.

My paper discusses Ian McGuire’ The North Water (2016) and Lydia Syson’s Mr Peacock’s Possessions (2018) as notable instances of this trend. Although set at the opposite ends of the globe (the Southern Pacific and the Arctic Sea respectively), The North Water and Mr Peacock’s Possessions share three key aspects: firstly, the violence against the natural world is presented as a continuation of colonial violence; secondly, that violence is a manifestation of Victorian modernity (coded as capitalist exploitation); thirdly, modernity is responsible for the disintegration of pre-existing communities and their values.

I aim to show how detailed examination of these novels indicates ways in which Neo-Victorian scholarship can engage in a reflection on the relationship between the environment and the sense of community that is widely perceived as having been lost in the 21st century.

Taking my cue from transcultural memory studies and the notion of traveling memory, I will analyse neo-Victorian famine novels, film and music with regard to the cultural orientation towards the hungry body and to the orientation memory takes in these ‘texts’. The Great Famine in Ireland caused mass migration and resulted in both geographical and cultural re- orientations. These are reflected for example in the scope of intertextual and intermedial references both in cultural products published in Ireland and in the diaspora. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea directs its memory work to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for instance, while Paul Lynch’s Grace (2017) evokes Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). It is certainly no surprise that the literature of the Hungry Forties serves as a major reference point for neo-Victorian famine literature, but these references also indicate re-orientations of memory that simultaneously re-negotiate the historiography of the famine. Lance Daly’s 2018 film Black 47, in turn, appropriates the Western genre to tackle the history of the famine, and thus overlays Irish and American cultural trajectories. Finally, in her song “Famine” (Universal Mother, 1994), Sinéad O’Connor samples a quatrain from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, interweaving her plea for a re-orientation of Irish history with the musical legacy of the coloniser, but also indicating future possible orientations of memory work. The geographical paths of migration caused by the famine lead to the emergence of a transnational and transcultural web of memories that is represented by hybridised cultural forms. The embodied situatedness of hunger finds its cultural representation in criss-crossing lines of memory work.

In her 2008 play A Vampire Story, Moira Buffini explored the effects that the trauma of rape had on the identity of her protagonist, Ella. Incapable of openly speaking about her experience, Ella becomes two: a past and present identity, her real self and her vampiric persona, the I and the Other, who at one point converge in the narrative as she finally addresses her traumatic experience.When she translated her play into a film script, Buffini transformed Ella into a vampire who lives in two different times, the nineteenth and the twenty-first century, as she inhabits her past by constantly retelling it in the present. Returning to the town where she was raped, she starts to envision her own past self, as she tries to reconcile truth and lies, who she is with whom she was and who she wants to become. Ella becomes then particularly liminal, as she inhabits an in-between time and self.

This paper will address how Buffini creates a palimpsestic narrative in which places and times overlap, and the self is rewritten from rape survivor to vampiric Other, with the former always underlying the new identity. With this interplay between past and present, moreover, the abuses of the nineteenth century correlate to those of contemporary society, so as to prove that women, vampiric or otherwise, are still vulnerable to violence and marginalization.

As Heilmann and Llewellyn note in their introduction to Victoriographies (Issue 5.2, 2015), ‘there is a shortage of men in neo-Victorianism. Or that, at least, is how it would appear’ (Heilmann & Llewellyn, 2015: 97). This paper aims to redress that shortage by shifting the neo-Victorian gaze onto the complex network of relations between the central male figures of Ripper Street (BBC/Amazon, 2012-2016), examining the series’ representations of masculinity, the traumas of male violence, and its potential for emergent structures of male kinship and care.

What writing there is on Ripper Street focuses on the series’ seeming commitment to the spectacle of violence towards women, varying degrees of historical inaccuracy, and accusations of imitation. Whilst acknowledging these criticism, however, and without becoming an apologist for male violence, the paper seeks to suggest that within the series there is a subtle shift of focus – a reorientation – towards the framing of male brutality as a newly traumatic experience for men. In this, the paper takes the position that the violence of the series is arguably less interesting as a spectacle and more compelling as a symptom of discussions about emerging masculinities in the twenty-first century. In turn, this allows further exploration of networks of support, of kinship and care, that come to exist between the men of Ripper Street: from Drake’s search for respectability and love; Jackson’s attempt at professional recognition and respite from pursuit, to Drake’s mitigation of her father’s ‘sins’ to Matilda, and the reconstruction of the broken Detective Inspector in later episodes.

This paper will consider cultural intersections between Golden Age detective fiction and neo-Victorian historical crime novels. Diversification in neo-Victorian orientation to the past becomes evident when considering Nicola Upson’s pastiche novels, The Death of Lucy Kyte (2013), and Two For Sorrow (2010). Set in the increasingly popular inter-war era, Upson’s series of novels feature a fictional writer named Josephine Tey (pseudonym of real-life Golden Age crime novelist, Elizabeth Mackintosh). The novels, with “a strong biographical thread”, return to two infamous nineteenth-century crimes: ‘The Red Barn Murder’ and the late-Victorian case of the ‘Finchley Baby Farmers’. Detective fiction is an inherently self-reflexive form, whereby, as Peter Thoms points out, ‘the “case” becomes a story about making a story’; this paper will examine the metafictional processes used to depict acts of researching the past within the fictional world. Processes of detection uncover textual histories of sensationalised stories of Victorian criminality seen from new perspectives. Sarah Waters (also inspired by Tey) acknowledges a lingering influence of Victorian Gothic in her own pastiche inter-war fiction, stating that ‘each new Gothic narrative somehow recalls the ones before it’. Upson’s novels orientate readers back to nineteenth-century Gothic sensation through a pastiche prism of inter-war social history updated for a self-aware revisionist feminist agenda. Embedded acts of reading self-reflexively exploit the borderlines between fiction and history for changing social times and consciously revised attitudes.

Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) transports us to the intersecting personal and public lives of two Victorian celebrities: writer Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Flanagan self-consciously peppers these two narrative threads with references to historical events such as the Great Exhibition of London (1851) and to other historical figures (e.g., the women in the two great men’s lives often steal the spotlight); he frames the fictional account of events that transpired in various settings across the globe, as well as the narrator’s insights into the characters’ motives and passions, within the wider historical contexts of the age of exploration and the settlement of the Australian territories; and he incorporates historical documents, news reports and various artistic artifacts (most notably, an

1842 painting by Thomas Bock) into the narrative.

This paper will argue that what arises amidst this amalgamation is a masterful illustration of how the discourse of Orientalism is created and consumed, as well as how it in turn contributes to underscore and disseminate the ideological and political system that birthed it. Furthermore, drawing not only on Edward Said’s study on Orientalism, but also Marcia Langston’s intercultural redefinition of Aboriginality and Patrick Brantlinger’s orientations about extinction discourses, this paper will interrogate to what extent the contemporary dialogue that is established in the novel with the events of the 1830s-1850s in Van Diemens’s Land and Victorian Great Britain simultaneously questions and reinforces colonialist, orientalist discourses rooted in essentializing binary oppositions.

This paper will draw on Marie Luise Kohlke’s seminal work on Neo-Victorianism in 2008 in which she argued that the Victorians in Neo-Victorian works had become our new Orientals. In the absence of an unknown Orient that could still be discovered and mastered in the 21st century, the Victorians have come to be endowed with exotic qualities in Neo-Victorian productions – such as sensuality, mystery, etc. – which are reminiscent of the Victorian views on their contemporary others.  My contention is that unless ethical consumption of the Victorians becomes a new approach in Neo-Victorianism, no possibility of being sincerely oriented towards the Other seems possible in Neo-Victorian culture and literature. Indeed, Neo-Victorian productions at the moment seem to be always caught between two opposite trends, an interest in the voiceless characters of the 19th century – the Victorian subalterns – and a crave for sensationalism and exhibitionism which partakes of a commercial strategy aiming at making 21st-century readers and spectators « consume » the Victorians. It is interesting to study the collusion between consumerism, capitalism and Neo-Victorianism as, in Christian Gutleben’s terms, history, otherness and Victorians sell well (« l’histoire, l’altérité, les Victoriens, ça se vend », 2015, 127). It is also worth adding the imperial component to this articulation as the appropriation of certain subjects, such as in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus (2003) or even Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), cannot help recalling unequal power relations where the authors, despite being certainly well-intentioned, may deprive their objects of study of their potential voice and agency rather than enable them to emerge from historical invisibility. Overpowering authorial and/or narrative stance may share more elements with imperialism and colonialism than one might expect, such as the fact of silencing minor subjects and imposing hegemonic views onto them. This certainly has to do with the fact that English is the language in which Neo-Victorian works are still mainly written, and that « Anglo-America » is predominantly the location where such products originate from.   

In recent years, neo-Victorianism’s critical emphasis on ‘historiographic metafiction’ has begun to shift towards a more inclusive definition, which encompasses popular fiction, film, and television; theatre productions; the heritage industry; the political arena; and global cultural reimaginings of the long nineteenth century. In spite of these shifts, neo-Victorianism’s roots remain persistently located in the second half of the twentieth century, and its most frequently cited origin narratives the literary, intertextual fiction of authors such as Jean Rhys and John Fowles.  This paper proposes a revision to this dominant critical discourse, a reorientation of neo-Victorianism to encompass within its scope the literary and cultural productions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as works of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Via an examination of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular fiction, the paper posits the notion of a continuum which blurs the categories of ‘Victorian’ and ‘neo-Victorian’.  Moving from the Victorian sensation novel, through to late nineteenth-century reworkings of the genre, to early to mid- twentieth-century popular historical fictions, the paper traces the complex of web of intertextual associations which simultaneously define and blur the boundary between Victorian and neo-Victorian, popular and literary, and argues for a reconceptualising of neo-Victorianism as a critical category to encompass these lineages. With reference to works including Austin Fryer’s A New Lady Audley (1891), Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951) and Victoria Holt’s Shivering Sands (1969), the paper argues for a further expansion of neo-Victorian temporal and generic spaces to include those works and genres which remain on the periphery of the neo-Victorian project.

Through the revisionist lens of neo-Victorianism we strive to present a Victorian Era populated by communities often forgotten by history, but we are rarely allowed the luxury of reading real historical accounts written by queer Victorians; when we do, we are usually left with the impression than we can barely imagine the depths still hidden in some corners of history. This is usually the case when we delve into the extensive and surprising contents of the diaries of sir Roger Casement and Anne Lister.A renowned human-rights activist in the British colonies, sir Roger Casement’s (1864-1916) “Black Diaries” detail his homosexual encounters across the colonies and were ultimately used as evidence to have him found guilty and executed while being tried for high treason. After the trial, the diaries were kept under the custody of the British government for almost a century. Anne Lister (1791-1840), on the other hand, was a landowner, traveller and mountaineer from York. Her diaries, deciphered and edited by Helena Whitbread in the 1980s and thought to be a hoax when first discovered, describe her affective and sexual life with other women in a shockingly forthright and knowledgeable manner, and their publication challenged everything we thought we knew about queer women in the nineteenth century.   

In this paper, we would like to explore the written legacy of these Victorian diarists and their potential impact on contemporary queer studies and on the way we think about Victorian queer sexualities, in and beyond academia.

This essay sheds light on the new millenium’s Neo-Victorian rewriting and rethinking of historical contexts in Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith (2002). Waters intended a queering of history and a rethinking of long-established values (namely, gender and sexual identity) by reformulating the canonical narrative: she questions Victorian heteronormativity by turning the expected marriage plot into the identity quest of Maud and Sue, the two lesbian protagonists, if we understand marriage and the family as heterosexual institutions used to preserve normativity and power relations in a collective scale (Letissier 278).Furthermore, by exposing the hypocrisy of the Victorian period, Waters’ fiction arguably tries to “[right] the wrongs of the pasts” (367) and vindicates female independence from the biased shaping of sexual/gender identity through familial expectations, gender, psychoanalytic practices, violence, Victorian pornography (Kaplan, 50) or literature. These male-dominated and female- repressive spheres are twisted to create a discourse in which Maud and Sue survive to create their own narrative, to rewrite their own identity.

On the whole, this research would show both the connections and disconnections of historical novels to contemporary narratives also present (and hidden) in the Victorian period, and the reverse of literary canons with a specific intention.

The secondary sources used in this study are, among others, Bailén’s “Re-creating the Past: the Neo-Victorian Meaning in Sarah Waters’ Neo-Victorian Novels” (2012), Creaney’s “Sexual re-scripting: Ventriloquial Repetitions and Transformations in Sarah Waters’ ‘Tipping the Velvet’ and ‘Affinity” (2015), Kaplan’s “Fingersmith’s Coda: Feminism and Victorian Studies,” and Letissier’s “More Than Kith and Less Than Kin” in Neo-Victorian Families : Gender,  Sexual and Cultural Politics (2011).

Neo-Victorian novels do not lack in queer characters, but it does not follow that their representation and destinies are progressive: in one of the first seminal articles of our field, Lisa Fletcher pointed to the way that John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant Woman and A.S. Byatt’s Possession had “lesbianism […] raised as a possibility to be explicitly rejected” (Fletcher 2003 38). Often, genderbending is used as a plot twist or the key to the mystery, such as in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Sarah Water’s work is the exception to the rule, as her novels focus on lesbian love stories and queer families of choice: though the end may be utopian (Tipping the Velvet), tragic (Affinity) or hopeful (Fingersmith).

However, outside of ‘respectable’ literary fiction awaits a whole sub-genre where a queer Happily Ever After is not only a possibility but a requirement: m/m (gay) historical romance in a Victorian setting. This paper would focus more specifically on the backlist of two authors, Cat Sebastian and K.J. Charles. Both have, in their most recent books, explored queer retellings of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances: Unmasked by the Marquess rewrites Frederica (1965) as Band Sinister does Sylvester, or, the Wicked Uncle (1957). Both have also written genderqueer protagonists, which are very rare in romance. Charles, who often veers towards mystery and the neo-Gothic, has moreover written Holmesian fiction with The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, where the homoerotic component of Holmes and Watson’s relationship is made explicit. The books selected here are all from the twenty-first century, but the literary orientations are by no means new: we would aim to draw neo-Victorianism from its beaten literary path to discover the different horizons of genre fiction, and see how such a meeting could benefit both critical fields.

The paper argues that an interaction with neo-Victorian text of Fingersmith by Sara Waters and spatian particularities in it, that forward a reader’s self-conscious engagement ‘with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and revision concerning Victorians’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010), might be specified by paying attention to a number of nonrepresentational issues and ‘embodied readings’ (Keen 2018). Among them:

-An urban-specific mentality as ‘embodied practice’ (Thrift 1996, Plesske 2014). Waters focalizes the narrative through the eyes of Maud and Sue, both dramatically leaving their home locations. Making their home sites, which ironically are socially marginal places of poverty and misery, to be cherished by the characters as places of comfort and care, Waters is never tired of ‘estrangement’ effect based on minute observation of social otherness and involuntary absorption into it;   

-A present-day reader’s act of flânerie within the novel space as the spatial distance between audience and character is recreated in the temporal gap between the twenty-first century reader and the nineteenth-century narrator (Kohlke, 2008; Pettersson 2013). At the same time, by approaching the nineteenth century from a contemporary standpoint the reader gazes at the past adopting both a voyeuristic and a corporal attitudes. Thus, Waters not only recreates a historical past by staging it as a spectacle for the reader, but also making him immerse into multiple nuances of body affects (e.g. recurrent leitmotif of hair evokes feelings as different as physical disgust and extreme pleasure provided with historically grounded details as ‘sugary’ or ‘sewn to the head’, etc.);

The register shift from representational to nonrepresentational reading sustains a space for not mere analytical habits of mind, but for a blend of cognitive and affective capacities, linked to bodily responses that reinforce reader’s questioning about his own self-identity set against a radical and exoticised alterity of neo-Victorian sensibilities.

The reconceptualization of the house that begun in the eighteenth century evolved into a model of household that had its spaces strongly demarcated by gender. This gendered spatial division gained full force during Victorian times and gave way to the well- known dichotomy private/public. However, although the Victorian household was conceived as female, and therefore private, some of its spaces remained fluid and would operate both as public and private.

This paper argues that the domestic library or study was one of such in-between spaces which, although strongly inscribed as male, managed to retain a dual quality as both private and public. On the one hand, the library has been described as a male fortress within the nineteenth-century household where the paterfamilias could escape from the, sometimes overwhelming, female hustle and bustle. That is, the library or study was a place of male privacy, and thus, I suggest, private. On the other hand, however, this room is also portrayed as the domestic space where men were allowed to dispatch business free from female interference, which endows the library with public connotations.

Nonetheless, although many canonical nineteenth-century novels have validated this traditional “the library is male” motto, this space, precisely because of its in- betweenness, has offered some authors the opportunity of re-mapping it. This paper will look at Victorian and Neo-Victorian fictional domestic libraries and studies to explore the possibility of a feminist intervention that aims at re-orienting this seemingly all- male space and turn it into an arena of female empowerment and liberation.

The paper intends to investigate the dialogical concept of orientation in Peter Carey’s Booker prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988), which was also adapted into a successful film directed by Gillian Anderson in 1997. Careys’s novel makes extensive use of the idea of orientation, in both temporal and spacial terms. This emerges in the way it addresses questions of mobility, movement, the experience of migration and the voyage to an unknown, “other” geographical and human landscape such as nineteenth-century Australia, and, finally, the  relationship of bodies and objects, as represented by the protagonists’ obsession with gambling and their challenge over the ambitious and doomed glasswork church to be transplanted in a remote village of the Australian outback.

The novel unfolds that “polytemporality” that is distinctive of the historical time of neo-Victorian fiction as it is narrated from a contemporary perspective by a descendant of Oscar, the protagonist, as well as a polyspaciality that flows through the initial youth of the protagonists in England and Australia, the intersection of their separate paths through their encounter on the heterotopic  (and orientated) space of the ship, and finally progresses to the conjunction of religion and gambling, faith and randomness, sense of purpose and the inscrutable turns of chance.

Carey’s narrative strategies in Oscar and Lucinda valorise that “dynamic interplay and interrelations between past, present, and future as modes of temporal orientation” (V.Browne) that is so productive of creative engagements with the Victorian past,  but also displays an interest in that “generational time” (Browne) which is explored in the complex an non-linear genealogy between the narrator and the protagonist, and which constitutes an important early neo-Victorian example of the subtle inherence of the concept of orientation.

Without a polytemporal conception of historical time, ‘a time that is generated through the intersection of various times and temporalities’ (Browne, 2014: 26) the Neo-Victorian novel would not exist. The Neo-Victorian novel relies on our ability to think across time. In Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History Victoria Browne follows Dipesh Chakrabarty in suggesting that in order to overcome understandings of time as linear, and history as a totality, we must generate genealogies that are connective and simultaneously disruptive of that very connectivity. This, Chakrabarty contends, allows us to ‘contemplate the necessary fragmentary histories of human belonging’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 125).

This paper examines the production of polytemporality in Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel The Essex Serpent. Perry’s novel requires, from its outset, that the reader engage their understanding of at least four temporalities that are then superimposed, palimpsest-like, on top of each other, and which are each attended by a set of historical prejudices. By foregrounding a character whose depiction compels the reader to apply contemporary understandings of developmental disorders characterized by trouble with social interactions and communication to a Victorian setting, Perry insists upon a ‘“backwards-forwards” movement’ (Browne, 2014: 72) between past and present, but also between the representable and the unrepresentable. Considering Perry’s novel in the context of both historical fiction, and the Neo-Victorian, allows for a similar ‘backwards-forwards’ orientation. In questioning whether The Essex Serpent should be considered a Neo-Victorian text, this paper argues, its liminal position at the parameters of the Neo-Victorian might be precisely what enables the novel to allow us to reflect on the phenomenon of Neo-Victorianism.

2.  See, for instance, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, who read the neo-Victorian novel as “a belated abreaction or ‘working-through’ of nineteenth-century traumas, as well as those of our own times, albeit more obliquely” (2010, 3).

In my paper I would like to use Ryan’s concept of possible relations within a transfiction to discuss Penny Dreadful’s modes of engagement with the four novels from which it draws inspiration. The series has so far been described by critics and scholars as an appropriation, a loose adaptation or a mashup, but analysing it as part of a “transfiction” will allow for a more in-depth study of the ways in which it engages with the out-of-copyright material. Ryan posits that a relationship between two single texts within a transfiction can be seen as a mixture of three distinct modes: redundancy (both texts represent the same elements of the storyworld), expansion (the newer text represents previously unrepresented elements of the storyworld) and modification (a text introduces significant changes into the original storyworld).

In my paper I will explore the different ways in which Penny Dreadful engages with the four novels, and in which it contributes to their respective transfictions, and I will argue that the perspective of transmedia narratology might prove a useful interpretative tool of Neo-Victorian studies.

Orientation, or the spatial realm which requires one to adjust to the place in which he finds himself, is the crucial factor in the interpretation of the “Other”. As the visitor fills a new space, his encounter with the Other embodies eminent factors which are internally stowed within him as he struggles to find his space in a new place. His disposition to deal with and mingle with the “Other” in a particular space will lead him to conjure up perceptions of this Other and bear various interpretations of how he views this “Other” which he has encountered. The accessories that he brings within the baggage of his “self”, those pieces of him which he uses to try to relate with whomever he comes across, remain intact and in place. Although he has moved to a new place, he is unable to entirely strip himself of certain tendencies which he brings, even though the terrain which he has reached is entirely a new geographical territory.

Along the pilgrims’ road to Santiago, the wayfarer traces the steps of a countless number of ‘Others’ who once made their way to the shrine of the Saint in the northeastern corner of Spain. He has stepped on to a different road; a road which represents a tunnel of a different spatial time, the tunnel in which the movement of pilgrims in constant flow has been the impetus of endless encounters which have come to define travelers and help form identities of pilgrims and visitors for centuries. For any other, who has stepped into this place or space, taking the role of a pilgrim, from then on belongs to the travelers of the Road of Santiago.

The hospitality encountered in those who have aided the traveler along his journey, those appearing along the pilgrims’ road in or at some point and time during the sojourn, create this orientation that the traveller reaches and experiences as he moves to different towns and villages, finding himself in contrasting spaces in this tunnel which comes to an end in Compostela.

To explain these spatial orientations, literary works of early 20th century from both female and male travellers and authors will be used. Texts will be used which provide evidence of their accounts, of the trials and tribulations, of the recollections of a past journey which inevitably and unexpectedly came to shape their identities. The perception of the “Other” with whom they have encountered in these spaces shines through in the narrative of their works, shedding light upon the topic of orientation as a spatial notion.

‘By the mid-nineteenth century, the chief source of variability had shifted inward, to the multiple subjective viewpoints that shattered a single object into a kaleidoscope of images’ write Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in Objectivity, their stimulating book on the history of a scientific ideal (2010, 113). My paper purposes to examine how these ‘multiple subjective viewpoints’ were embodied, shared, and how they impacted the scientific world vision the Victorians progressively imposed as mainstream.

Because a consensual a priori vision is necessary to the development and the circulation of knowledge, the collective eye/I sets directions and, in a way, it anticipates the scientific explanations, justifications and discoveries it generates. Indeed, new ways of thinking and new ways of seeing evolve simultaneously as they both depend on the collective stance adopted. In the nineteenth century, according to Michel Foucault, the ‘scientific’ viewpoint, this ‘invariable structuring principle’, moved the perspective from a horizontal to a vertical one (The Order of Things, 219).

Through the examination of scientific visual material, this paper proposes an epistemological enquiry into the shifts in viewpoint that occured in the Victorian period, and an analysis of the changing orientation scientists envisaged in their relation with the natural world.

In Gerard Genette’s tripartite model for narrative voice as proposed in Narrative Discourse, temporality emerges as an important dimension to reveal the narrator’s position relative to the story. Four types of positions are hence prescribed for the relations between the narrating world and the narrated world: subsequent, prior, simultaneous and interpolated. The omniscient narrators in The French Lieutenant’s Woman(1969), Possession: A Romance (1990), The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), are respectively identified to hold subsequent temporal position with a simultaneous twist in the ending, subsequent position with an interpolated present, and simultaneous position with an interpolated present, all of which display a tendency to reorient the subsequent temporality dominating Victorian omniscient narration. Isotopic with these temporal positions are the implied authors’ stances toward the stories set in the Victorian past, which registers the different modes of contact (in Susan Lanser’s words) between the narrator and the narratee, and by extension between the author and the on- going academic discourse on the concept of omniscience. It is right in these terms, the changing temporal positions of the omniscient narrators in the three novels, published decades apart, represent a steady string of efforts to negotiate with the seemingly antiquated literary convention and recruit it into a Neo-Victorian re-orientation towards an increasingly diversified sense of temporality.

Released one year after the end of the Second World War, Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) affirmed the values of community life and a domestic spirituality associated with the Christmas season. The film was based on Philip Van Doren Stern’s short story “The Greatest Gift” (1943), and its general aesthetics are evocative of the idealised illustrations of American life by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) – some of which are nostalgically reminiscent of the 19th century. However, in its main theme, structure and characterisation, It’s a Wonderful Life is clearly indebted to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), the Victorian classic with which modern Christmas was “invented”, and one of Capra’s favourite stories. If in the tale three ghosts redeem Scrooge of his isolating misanthropy on Christmas Eve, in the film the angel Clarence is summoned to prevent George Bailey from committing suicide, also on the night before Christmas. Despite their common experience with supernatural visitors, Scrooge’s counterpart in Capra’s film is not George, a generous and personable young man, the self-sacrificing humane manager of the co-operative Building and Loan, loved and trusted by the community. Mr Potter is the greedy and ruthless banker, the Scrooge of the film and George’s enemy; the connection with Dickens’s tale is reinforced by elements of Potter’s characterisation: his old- fashioned carriage and office, his retinue of employees resembling servants. I propose to explore It’s a Wonderful Life in its double chronological orientation: its drawing on a Victorian classic and its hope of recovery after the war.

With half of its narrative set in nineteenth-century Britain and the other half in the Thatcherite 1980s, A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novel Possession draws parallels between the Victorian past and the novel’s contemporary present, directing the reader’s attention in particular to the increasing commodification of the past, including the Victorian past, in Britain under the Thatcher administration. The 1980s in Britain was a moment in which heritage became especially prominent in government policy and public life. Today, heritage in Britain has become ubiquitous, taking the form of diverse things and practices ranging from “stately homes” and Battle of Bosworth re-enactments to Laura Ashley prints and “heritage” soap dishes. The trope of possession in Byatt’s novel has multiple meanings, not least of which is the possession or ownership of objects inherited from the past. In making the ownership of cultural property a central focus of narrative interest, Possession parodies the burgeoning of the “heritage industry” and its notion of patrimony in 1980s Britain. It pokes fun at Anglo-American competition over cultural property in this relentless commodification of British heritage, not only since the 1980s, but also in the Victorian past that the novel depicts. Possession connects the British heritage industry in the present with the history of the concept of cultural property, which gained credence in Britain in the long nineteenth century partly in reaction to the threat of wealthy Americans purchasing heritage monuments and artefacts that the British felt was rightfully theirs.

North and South is a Victorian novel published in instalments in 1855 and structured around contraries, opposed elements, which may or may not be reconciled. Its title is in itself an emblem of those dichotomies between the peaceful South and the convoluted North of England, between the (new) rich and the (new) poor, and the very date of publication takes us to a period of social turmoil in England since both the Industrial Revolution and the bleak conditions imposed on workers brought about much suffering and riots against poverty, as well as writings and projects in order to bring about change. Victorian women writers explored their relationships with the Other in their private sphere and very rarely in the public one both in life and in literature. This paper, based in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, will explore the representation of strength as the “rationale” for trade unions and the role women may have in class conflicts and in their possible solutions.

Harriet Martineau, well-known Victorian sage who rationally stood up against unjust social, political and cultural issues paradoxically proved a vein that met Victorian fondness for the analysis of the power of the mind and its manifestations. At a time when Spiritualism, Mesmerism or Phrenology were leit-motifs in letters, essays and literary productions, her vindication for the use of the scientific method to analyse the benefits of Mesmerism and for the creation of a valid institution in charge -“a curative agency”-  marked her contribution to the birth of psychology, as analysed by Torgeson (2017). Translating Martineau’s Letters on Mesmerism with a Neo-victorian prism allows the reading of her ideas in a process of dynamic interplay between past and present. It shows Martineau’s serious reflections within the context of other philosophical, intellectual and scientific discussions that attempted incursions on the irrational side of life, such as Schopenhauer’s “Essay on Spirit seeing and everything connected therewith” (1851) and confirms her social orientation towards a beneficial dimension of Mesmerism.

This proposal draws on visual and biographical analysis to examine the portrayal of the personal and professional bonds between the Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal in the BBC series Desperate Romantics (2009). Although not the first to focus on the ups and downs of their relationship (previous television productions on this same topic include Ken Russell’s 1868 biopic Dante’s Inferno (1868) or John Hale’s The Love School, broadcasted seven years later) the 2009 series has proven particularly successful in presenting a bold, stylish (but also risky) retelling of the story of the original Pre-Raphaelite Circle in a way which may appeal to both connoisseurs and newcomers alike. While projecting a share of contemporary topics and aspects in the process, the dialogue established with the mid-Victorian past skilfully captures and updates the usual mixture of enthusiasm, defiance and frustration which has become a constant in most critical (Doughty, Marsh, Prettejohn, McGann…) and artistic (Savage, Hickney, Muñoz Puelles…) approaches to Rossetti, Miss Siddal and their contemporaries. Nonetheless, one may also easily notice a range of biased omissions, additions and distortions guiding the audience towards a somewhat reductionistic -or even prejudiced- view of Rossetti’s role, his treatment of Miss Siddal and the latter’s relevance in his aesthetic programme. Our aim is not essentially to gauge this series’ biographical accuracy, but to examine whether it simply rekindles the ‘dark legend’ about Rossetti and Siddal, or else stands as a genuine attempt at connecting the spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism with a modern audience.

Nineteenth-century London was an effervescent and vibrant web of imaginative interactions and experiences for city-dwellers with countless invisible threads to unveil. One of such invisible microcosms was spectacle; an industry which was key for understanding the development of modernity and the city. Copious geographies of nineteenth-century London spectacle have been mapped following different scales and criteria. Yet the various ways of viewing, mapping and experiencing the city are not objective and innocuous representations of spatial relations. If we take for granted Lefebvre’s ideas that maps always represent a certain form of power to make sense of the world, the process of mapping has correspondingly the power of bringing to light other challenging perspectives; alternative spatial orientations.

As I aim to demonstrate here, the map London’s nineteenth-century entertainment industry is a dynamic space which offers multifarious readings. In this paper I offer an unconventional and gendered map which has women as transmitters of the classics in the theatrical industry as its central focus. For my analysis, I have limited my time span to the year 1893, which coincides in time with the boom of the fallen woman on stage. I consider the balloon-view of the city from the 1893 ascents at the Crystal Palace to uncover numerous theatrical venues (women’s clubs, pleasure gardens and concert halls, among others) that validate the theory that women as creators and agents of the classical revival played an essential role in the theatre history of the nineteenth century which has long been forgotten.

Sentiment analysis refers to the use of natural language processing and text analysis to identify and quantify sentiment and subjective information in texts. Our tool, Lingmotif (Moreno-Ortiz, 2017) is a lexicon-based, linguistically-motivated, user-friendly, Sentiment Analysis application able to analyze any type of input texts, regardless of their length and topic. It offers easy-to-interpret visual representations of quantitative data (text polarity, sentiment intensity, sentiment profile), as well as a detailed, qualitative analysis of the text in terms of its sentiment. Nowadays, Sentiment Analysis is widely applied in many fields of knowledge such as: product reviews, tourism or finance. Sentiment Analysis offers new research opportunities for Digital Humanities.

In this presentation, we introduce an automatic method for analyzing literary texts and three popular Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories were processed: “Morella” (1835), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Masque of Red Death” (1842). This research allowed us to observe coincidences in the sentiment flow of the narratives as well as identify scenes to the plot development. Results of experiments on Poe’s short stories are presented along with discussion of how this work can be extended.

In this paper I will present a distant reading of narrative events in Victorian novels (1840-1920). The main objective is to show how digital humanities help us to find recurrent literary features from a large corpus of novels (from the Victorian and  Edwardian era in this case) through the automatic semantic analysis of texts (Jockers and Mimno, 2013). Specifically, I will try to establish the most characteristic or typical narrative events that define Victorian novels (or, at least, the novels included in the corpus). These narrative events have been extracted from the ELTeC-ENG corpus, a corpus of English novels written between 1840 and 1920. It is a part of the ELTeC corpus (Odebrecht et al. 2019), a multilingual corpus of novels written in this period (1840-1920) in Europe and developed at the COST-Action “Distant Reading for European Literary History” (https://www.distant-reading.net/). Besides English, it includes novels written in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and many other European languages. Unlike other digital corpus of novels, ELTeC corpus  includes not only canonical novels, but also less-known novels as the ones with very few editions, as well as novels written by women (up to 50% for each language if it is possible), and both long and short novels.  In any case, it is a balanced corpus that includes samples of different types of novels, all of them published during Victorian and Edwardian era. The narrative events have been extracted automatically with TIP-Sem (Llorens et al, 2010), a Natural Language Processing  system that is able to extract event structures from texts and temporary relationships between them. In order to establish the characteristic or typical events, some common techniques based on word frequencies have been applied as as MFW (most frequent words) or TF/IDF (term frequency / inverse document frequency).  A list of characteristic narrative events has been extracted from each novel as well as from the overall corpus. The main contribution of this paper is, then, these lists of narrative events that could be used as empirical base to be compared with the narrative events of current neo-Victorian novels or the narrative events of novels written in other languages during the same period.

It is often through social mobility or ambiguity that criminal motives in Victorian mysteries can be fully unearthed, and this is just as true for pieces written during the nineteenth century as it is for those composed today. This essay analyses the evolution of perceptions of social mobility in the form of interaction among various classes outside of the domestic setting for contemporary versions of Victorian women in relation to those characterisations of the day through the common tropes of birthright (and its associated guilt), charity and marriage. Detective fiction is the perfect vehicle for this enquiry, because as Catherine Nickerson asserts in “Murder as Social Criticism,” “the genre is deeply enmeshed with most of the thornier problems of the Victorian [… era] including gender roles and privileges, racial prejudice and the formation of racial consciousness, the significance and morality of wealth and capital, and the conflicting demands of privacy and social control” (744). Thus, more specifically, this chapter uses texts on gender, etiquette and feminism to examine and compare portrayals of women’s social mobility from actual Victorian mysteries, such as those from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (serialised between March of 1852 and September of 1853), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1906) with those in the William Monk series by Anne Perry (1990-present) and the Sebastian St. Cyr series by C.S. Harris (2005-present). This essay ultimately proposes that changing views on marriage have had the greatest effect on the ways in which the new Victorian female is portrayed in detective fiction, as contemporary characters possess greater freedoms in their approaches to solving crimes indicative of a post-second-wave feminist re-envisioning of the woman’s role in society.

During the last decades, neo-Victorian fiction has attained both critical and popular acclaim, due to both a nostalgia for Victorian modes of representation, as well as a desire to recuperate marginalized voices from the period. Furthermore, at a time when women are increasingly fighting for their right to be heard, neo-Victorian fiction has the potential to recover the stories of nineteenth-century female characters ‘who did not comply with Victorian constructions of femininity’ (Arias and Pulham xix). On the other hand, (neo-)Victorian screen adaptations are currently gaining momentum, especially TV series such as Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), Frankenstein’s Chronicles (2015-), or Taboo (2017-). This paper examines how female oppression is portrayed in Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), by exploring the ethical implications that this representation might have on both Victorian and contemporary settings. First, I analyse how the historical distancing establishes a dialogical relationship between the Victorian past and the present time, which might allow contemporary spectators define their stance on female oppression in a more impartial and detached way. Secondly, I argue that most neo-Victorian creators return to the nineteenth century, as it is considered the point of departure of some of our present concerns, so as to find a resolution to these conflicts. The results of this paper show that neo-Victorian fiction brings social wrongs to the surface that still have current relevance at present, and recovers the hidden narratives of Victorian women, in order to empower their contemporary counterparts to make their voices be heard.

The contemporary African American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote the play Venus based on the historical figure of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who lived in South Africa (1789-1815). In 1810 the British surgeon William Dunlop bought her and took her away to London, where she was called the “Hottentot Venus” and displayed in a cage. Thus, she was exhibited as a freak in fairs all over England and France because her enormous buttocks and hypertrophied vaginal labia had been manipulated in Africa so that they reached an extraordinary size. In fact, they were called the Hottentots’ apron. (Neo-Victorian Freakery, H. Davis, 2015).

The amazing story of a fortune-seeker African woman was transformed by Parks into a fluid transnational and a transcultural neo-Victorian biodrama about the colonization of the African female body that brings to stage an amazing character who has a haunting voice with insightful reflections. In Venus the playwright transforms Sarah Baartman’s story and analyzes, with an intriguing language, how the Victorian anthropological and scientific theories about colour, race, gender, and national differences were used to justify colonial imperialism and racial exploitation. Therefore, the African female body becomes a symbol of the history of the dispossessed but paradoxically the play also reflects on how the protagonist develops into a prisoner of her own colonized body. In this paper, I explore how Parks’s neo-Victorian re-writing of Sarah Baartman’s colonial story brings to the present a ubiquitous character on stage that speaks about African colonization, slavery in the United States, and the contemporary commercialization of the female body. In the same way, I analyze how a colonial individual story becomes the universal history of the African women and their cultural objectification by the empire.

Considered by many critics her highest achievement in storytelling, The Children’s Book  by A. S. Byatt (2009) has often been read as a palimpsest of different late-Victorian features, ranging from the Woman Question to the problematic inheritance of the fairy tale. Among the authors chosen as a specimen by Byatt for her imitation of this typical fin de siècle genre, critics have singled out J.M. Barrie, Andrew Lang and Kenneth Grahame. There is one writer, nevertheless, that has escaped their notice: Maurice Hewlett (1861-1923) who, although nowadays largely forgotten, was one of the most popular author of the Edwardian era. According to Byatt, his bizarre autobiographical account of encounters with fairies,The Lore of Proserpine (1913), was instrumental in her own comprehension of the Edwardian obsession with the fairy lore.

In this connection, my paper aims to investigate to what extent the depiction of fairies adopted by Hewlett in his book has been appropriated and re-shaped by Byatt.

To this end, chapters of the novel quoting Hewlett, as well as articles written years before the publication of The Children’s Book, are examined with the aim of providing to future readers a better understanding of her last work, a masterpiece of inter-textual ingenuity in which Hewlett’s approach to elves and fairies plays a dominant role.

Although neither Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1939) nor Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) are set during the Victorian era, the considerable influence of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) on both is clearly apparent, giving these texts a distinct neo-Victorian Gothic orientation. The Victorian Gothic and later sensation fiction also relocated familiar tropes of eighteenth century Gothic fictions within more modern settings, domesticating tropes of ruins, abbeys, and castles into ancestral mansions, such as Brontë’s Thornfield Hall. This change helped assure the continuation of the Gothic genre well into the twentieth- and now twenty-first centuries, influencing authors such as du Maurier, who would later inspire Waters. This paper argues that the Victorian era persistently returns to haunt the reader through adaptations of Gothic mansions that repress and provoke marital and familial breakdown. Despite a shift in time and setting, the intertextual relationship between these texts is explicit in the authors’ deliberate adoption of the Victorian Gothic style. Moreover, they do so self-consciously, subverting the reader’s expectations of the Gothic novel. Through the trope of the declining ancestral estate/country manor house, this paper will explore the transformation of social relations to suggest how the neo-Victorian Gothic genre is oriented toward the future yet reminiscent of the past. 

This paper investigates the way The Handmaiden (2017), South-Korean adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), provides a way of considering neo-Victorian adaptation in the globalised context. Although set in Korea under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s, the film indirectly refers to the influence of Victorian Britain in the background. Replacing Fingersmith’s class conflict with the cultural conflict between Japan and Korea, The Handmaiden represents the intricate process of cultural colonisation. Korean society in the 1930s is depicted in the film as doubly indebted to Victorian British and Japanese culture, for Japan modernised the country through absorbing Western culture in the late nineteenth century.

The Handmaiden’s engagement with Victorian Britain demonstrates Priya Joshi’s statement that ‘”Victorian” refers today … to a set of interrelated cultural, intellectual, and social preoccupations that far outlive the originary moment’1. The influence of Victorian Britain that has a looming presence in the background of The Handmaiden is a case in point, for the film reveals the way Victorian British culture resonates in a country distant from Britain in a different time period. The Handmaiden serves to globalise the definition of the term ‘(neo-)Victorian’ by shedding light on the influence of Victorian Britain in Korean society in the 1930s. The Handmaiden’s unique way of bringing together Victorian Britain and the regional politics of 1930s Northeast Asia serves to widen the range of neo-Victorian imaginations.

1. Priya Joshi, ‘Globalizing Victorian Studies’, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2011), p. 38.

The destiny of John Clare, the so-called “peasant poet” from Helpston, may be seen a paradigmatic example of the dissolution of Romantic poetics, which coincideed with the entrance in the Victorian frame of mind.

Contemporary novelists and filmmakers have shown a great interest in the story of this unfortunate and unique artist, who was considered a sort of cultural freak. In my paper I will focus in particular on Hugh Lupton’s novel The Ballad of John Clare (2010), which describes Clare’s formative years at Helpston, followed by Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009), which narrates Clare’s experience in Dr. Matthew Allens’s asylum in High Beech during the same years in which Alfred Tennyson attended this medical institution. John Clare makes his appearance also in John Logan’s successful TV series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), set in late-Victorian London, in the role of Victor Frankenstein’s creature. Finally, I will treat Andrew Kötting’s movie By Our Selves (2015), which re-imagines Clare’s memorable 80-miles walk from Epping Forest to Northborough through an allusive and provocative visual style, alongside Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison (2005), which similarly retraces Clare’s escape from the asylum by mixing a narration “on the road” and a reflection on the nature of poetic inspiration.

By analysing Clare’s various textual afterlives, my paper aims at proving that the recuperation of this poet as a transitional figure can further illuminate our understanding of the nineteenth century and, at the same time, can help to reflect on contemporary issues such as ecology, isolation, and the discrimination of what society reputes as deviants.

Neo-Victorianism is now acknowledged as an important literary and cultural phenomenon as shows the extensive scholarship that emerged in the last two decades. However, few attention has been paid to particular areas such as graphic texts for children. Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca N. Mitchell’s groundbreaking study Drawing on the Victorians uncovered the importance of the interplay between images and text calling for new reading/interpreting process in both Victorian and neo-Victorian graphic texts. Most strikingly, they claim that such texts “construct theories about the act of reading and the role of the reader.” (Jones & Mitchell 27). The following paper follows their lead while being oriented towards graphic texts for children/young adults.

I offer to take a close look at a series of French gamebooks rewriting the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes – BD dont vous êtes le héros. These gamebooks offer children another kind of engagement with graphic texts since they are asked to read “visual palimpsests” while also being invited to endorse an active position within the narrative. Indeed, readers are invited to take up the role of Holmes himself, Irene Adler or even Moriarty. This kind of graphic texts, I contend, reconfigures the relation to the narrative which becomes discontinuous and uncertain. Reading turns into a investigation, a performance which blurs the boundary separating reader and author. I would thus like to suggest that such new graphic texts inscribe themselves within the concerns of the neo-Victorian agenda by questioning the status of narrative, authorship and of the reading process.

1. Unison: public employees and the health services.

2. “A world to win: Women and trade unions.” https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-202d-a-world-to-win-women-and-trade-unions Accessed 22.11.2018

3. Busby, Nicole and Rebecca Zahn, 2016. “A Dangerous Combination?” http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/06/20/womens-trade-unionism/ Accessed 22.11.2018