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Fiction classified as neo-Victorian has steadily emerged as a crucial mode of British cultural production. It is no coincidence that this most recent Victorian renaissance is taking shape in a climate of widespread empire nostalgia, with imperial-colonial legacies being relegated to a distant elsewhere. In its critical re-visitations of the nineteenth century, neo-Victorianism has the potential to intervene in this often selective memory of Britain s imperial past. Nevertheless, systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate.
This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British centres in opposition to remote imperial margins. It examines why domesticity broadly understood as ideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations of gender, sexuality, and class can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism s larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.
Info autore
Marlena Tronicke
is Senior Lecturer in British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her main areas of research and teaching include (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, early modern and contemporary British drama, gender and queer studies, as well as adaptation. Her first monograph,
Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter
, was published in 2018. She is co-editor of
Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains
(special issue of
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
, 2020, with Caroline Koegler and Pavan Malreddy),
Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters
(special issue of
Neo-Victorian Studies
, 2020, with Caroline Koegler), and the edited collection
Black Neo-Victoriana
(2021, with Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Julian Wacker).
Riassunto
Fiction classified as ‘neo-Victorian’ has steadily emerged as a crucial mode of British cultural production. It is no coincidence that this most recent Victorian renaissance is taking shape in a climate of widespread empire nostalgia, with imperial-colonial legacies being relegated to a distant ‘elsewhere.’ In its critical re-visitations of the nineteenth century, neo-Victorianism has the potential to intervene in this often selective memory of Britain’s imperial past. Nevertheless, systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate.
This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British ‘centres’ in opposition to remote imperial ‘margins.’ It examines why domesticity – broadly understood as ideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations of gender, sexuality, and class – can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism’s larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.
