Neo-Victorian Cities

Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-90-420-3932-2
Verlag: Editions Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band Vol. 4, 370 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 220 mm, Gewicht: 580 g

Reihe: Neo-Victorian Series

This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the feminised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.

“Since the so-called ‘spatial turn’, cultural geography has become one of the most vibrant fields in cultural studies, with approaches ranging from a Benjamin-inflected urban phenomenology to approaches in urban sociology, media geography, psychogeography, cultural architecture, etc. The volume offers unique insights into both the contemporary and the Victorian urban mentality, thus contributing significantly both the Urban Studies and Neo-Victorian Studies circuits. The well-written and well-structured essays are informed by expert knowledge of relevant texts across media borders, and portray the neo-Victorian take on Victorian cities as fascinating, ever-changing palimpsest of historical narratives and practices. ” – Prof. Dr. Eckart Voigts (TU Braunschweig)

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kohlke, Marie-Luise

Gutleben, Christian

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie Historische Geographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents
Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben: Troping the Neo-Victorian City: Strategies of Reconsidering the Metropolis
Part I. Capitalising on the Palimpsestic City
Kate Mitchell: Making and Unmaking ‘Marvellous Melbourne’: The Colonial City as Palimpsest in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Non-Fiction
Nathalie Vanfasse: Neo-Victorian Cities and the Ramifications of Global Capitalism in Ayeesha Menon’s Mumbai Chuzzlewits
Isabelle Cases: Re-imagining the Victorian Flâneur in the 1960s: The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher and Norman Cohen
Julian Wolfreys: ‘Part Barrier, Part Entrance to a Parallel Dimension’: London and the Modernity of Urban Perception
Part II. Gothicising the Metropolitan Deathscape
Jean-Michel Ganteau: Vulnerable Visibilities: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous Victorian Metropolis
Mariaconcetta Costantini: Mapping Gothic London: Urban Waste, Class Rage and Mixophobia in Dan Simmons’s Drood
Susan K. Martin: Neo-Victorian Cities of the Dead: Contemporary Fictions of the Victorian Cemetery
Paul Dobraszczyk: Londons under London: Mapping Neo-Victorian Spaces of Horror
Part III. Romancing the Commodified Metropolis
Laura Helen Marks: A Strangely Mingled Monster: Gender and Spatial Transgression in the Hardcore Metropolis of Paul Thomas’s Jekyll and Hyde
Margaret D. Stetz: Steampunking New York City in Kate and Leopold
Barry Sheils: The Ship and the Gun: The Perversity of Neo-Victorian Belfast in Glenn Patterson’s The Mill for Grinding Old People Young
Elizabeth Ho: Adaptive Re-Use: Producing Neo-Victorian Space in Hong Kong
Contributors
Index