2025-04-26
Mel Kohlke
This critical introduction explores the thematics of the 2024/2025 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on Neo-Victorian Contagion through the lenses of viropolitics, Sherlock Holmesian investigative tropes, disease metaphors, ethics of care contesting forms of Othering, and disciplinary regimes of power promoting political and capitalist interests. It outlines likely future trajectories of and developments in neo-Victorian contagion fiction, as well as introducing the special issue contributions.
2025-04-26
Margaret D. Stetz
This review essay considers Elstob's Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond in the context of recent neo-Victorian visual artworks and exhibitions and the relative scarcity of critical work on this aspect of neo-Victorian culture.
2025-04-26
Benjamin O'Dell
While Zadie Smith’s fiction has often related feelings of social density and change through lengthy chronologies exploring generational difference, The Fraud is her first “proper” historical novel. Set over several decades in the nineteenth century, the novel imagines the interconnection between two characters on the fringe of the historical record: Eliza Touchet, cousin by marriage, housekeeper, advisor, and former lover of the popular novelist William Ainsworth, and Andrew Bogle, an emancipated Jamaican who becomes a person of interest during the Tichborne affair, a sensational legal saga that occupied the public imagination for years. Smith’s status as one of the twenty-first century’s most prominent authors ensures that The Fraud will have a large audience. At the same time, however, many readers will likely complain about the difficulty the novel presents in its obscure references and challenging form. Unlike the authors of nineteenth-century historical romance, who frequently use their works to dramatize historical events and catalogue the habits, values, and languages of cultures on the verge of disappearance, Smith allows descriptions of her novel’s historical context to occupy a secondary position. Events are referred to, but rarely elaborated on. Instead, the novel’s chapters weave together brief, disjointed, and occasionally impressionistic episodes that only gradually cohere into something resembling a traditional plot. While these features demand a laser-like focus from the reader, Smith’s powers of characterisation and self-conscious centring of under-examined perspectives highlight The Fraud ’s position as a significant accomplishment, both in terms of her own artistic development and the development of the historical novel as a genre.
2025-04-26
Sarah E. Beyvers
This article explores the depiction of contagious diseases in two neo-Victorian video games. In both Ready at Dawn’s The Order: 1886 (2015) and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored (2012), disease is used to comment on Victorian anxieties about class. The antagonist of Dishonored lets loose plague-carrying rats in the working-class districts of the capital as part of his “Poverty Eradication Plan”, which then affects the entire population. In The Order: 1886 , the aristocratic player-character Grayson is tasked with ridding London of so-called Half-Breeds, creatures like werewolves or vampires, which seem to have taken over Whitechapel. At first glance, both games establish a rather clear-cut and decidedly classist distinction between ‘good/rich/healthy’ and ‘evil/poor/diseased’. Yet, in both cases, this illusion soon vanishes as the player uncovers a conspiracy of social control and engineering originating from the aristocracy. Both video games represent a metropolis in crisis and renegotiate Victorian anxieties about urban public space, and thus about poverty, contagion, and middle-class desire for spatial and ideological separation from the poor.
2025-04-26
Alessandra Olga Grazia Serra
Victorian fictional representations of infection tended to equate normalcy with a healthy state and compliance with the established order, categorising outcasts and non-compliant individuals as enemies of development and menaces to society. This article examines two televisual adaptations of Frankenstein ’s creature, which interrogate the resulting conflations of non-normative characters with ‘carrier of contagion’ that precipitate cultural degeneration. In Penny Dreadful , during the outbreak of a near-apocalyptic infection, the reanimated John Clare disrupts his creator’s unethical scientific work of resuscitating corpses. In The Frankenstein Chronicles , the police officer John Marlott is infected with syphilis before becoming an ‘undead being’, while he investigates the moral corruption at the heart of an epidemic plaguing the poorest districts of London. Both ostracised ‘monsters’ decode the rotten mechanisms of society, exposing a body politic plagued by economic inequality and inhumanity through acts of (counter-cultural) viropolitical resistance. Subversively, the two neo-Victorian texts thus also metaphorically ‘contaminate’ the literary canon of horror fiction, refiguring ‘monsters’ as quasi-political activists.
2024-06-07
Lana Dalley
There has been a recent turn towards the personal voice and creative memoir in Victorian Studies; works like Nell Stevens’s The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time (2018) and Annette R. Federico’s edited volume My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice (2020) explore and dramatise personal engagements with Victorian literature. Such texts make explicit what often remains invisible in literary criticism: scholars’ personal, affective relationships with historical texts and the imagined lives of authors, and how such relationships shape their scholarly and pedagogical pursuits. In so doing, such texts challenge the established idea that rigorous scholarly work necessarily precludes the inclusion of personal experience. In this essay, I situate The Victorian and the Romantic within the genre of new experiential literary criticism to demonstrate how affective engagement with literary texts can expand – rather than contract – interpretive possibilities and give readers insight into women’s writerly lives.
2024-06-07
Amanda Farage
Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince (2018) is a neo-Victorian biofictional film that depicts Oscar Wilde’s final years in exile within the narrative framework of his 1888 children’s story of the same name. In the film, Wilde (portrayed by Everett) recounts excerpts from the story both as a narrator and onscreen character, which facilitates narrative time jumps from his deathbed to earlier points in his life, and illuminates different aspects of the author by comparing him to various characters from the fairytale. With a desire to invite viewers to relate to Oscar the man, rather than Wilde the icon, Everett fashions a rendering of the author that is intensely personal and based upon his own connection with this famous figure. This filmic biofiction is thus a curious blend of fiction and reality, literary work and life experience.
2024-06-07
Shannon Scott
Review of Sarah Leavitt, Agnes, Murderess
2024-06-07
Armelle Parey, Charlotte Wadoux
Guest Editors' introduction to the 15:1 Special Issue: Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media (2023/2024)
2023-06-23
Neo-Victorian Studies 14:1 (2021/2022)