Neo-Victorian Gothic (Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century)

This volume, the third in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, reassesses neo-Victorianism as a quintessentially Gothic movement. Through their revival of bygone spectres, their obsession with forgotten skeletons in the cupboard, and their exploration of nineteenth-century extremities, neo-Victorian works not only reflect our contemporary Gothic culture but also reactivate it and even enrich it with new variations such as postcolonial, eco or steampunk Gothic. Addressed to scholars and students of both Gothic and Neo-Victorian Studies, this volume will also interest contemporary literature specialists, cultural theorists, and those working on popular historical memory, as it explores the paradox of culture’s coincident turn to ethics and sensationalism. As exemplified in its generic variety and hybridity, neo-Victorian Gothic resorts to the spectacularisation of horror while simultaneously demonstrating the hyperreal, textual and self-reflexive nature of these spectacles, just as it resorts to the exploitation of hyperbolic and violent sexuality at the same time as challenging sexual norms and identity politics. In spite of these apparent contradictions, the Gothic forms of neo-Victorianism demonstrate their fundamentally ethical goal of interrogating the uncertain limits between self and other, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, past and present.