Neo-Victorian Cities

Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-90-04-29234-5
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 4, 370 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 572 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 femininised 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Kohlke, Marie-Luise

Gutleben, Christian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturkritik: Hermeneutik und Interpretation
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

Troping the Neo-Victorian City: Strategies of Reconsidering the Metropolis, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben

PART I: Capitalising on the Palimpsestic City
1. Making and Unmaking ‘Marvellous Melbourne’: The Colonial City as Palimpsest in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Non-Fiction, Kate Mitchell
2. Neo-Victorian Cities and the Ramifications of Global Capitalism in Ayeesha Menon’s Mumbai Chuzzlewits, Nathalie Vanfasse
3. Re-imagining the Victorian Flâneur in the 1960s: The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher and Norman Cohen, Isabelle Cases
4. ‘Part Barrier, Part Entrance to a Parallel Dimension’: London and the Modernity of Urban Perception, Julian Wolfreys

PART II: Gothicising the Metropolitan Deathscape
5. Vulnerable Visibilities: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous Victorian Metropolis, Jean-Michel Ganteau
6. Mapping Gothic London: Urban Waste, Class Rage and Mixophobia in Dan Simmons’s Drood, Mariaconcetta Costantini
7. Neo-Victorian Cities of the Dead: Contemporary Fictions of the Victorian Cemetery, Susan K. Martin
8. Londons under London: Mapping Neo-Victorian Spaces of Horror, Paul Dobraszczyk

PART III: Romancing the Commodified Metropolis
9. A Strangely Mingled Monster: Gender and Spatial Transgression in the Hardcore Metropolis of Paul Thomas’s Jekyll and Hyde, Laura Helen Marks
10. Steampunking New York City in Kate and Leopold, Margaret D. Stetz
11. The Ship and the Gun: The Perversity of Neo-Victorian Belfast in Glenn Patterson’s The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, Barry Sheils
12. Adaptive Re-Use: Producing Neo-Victorian Space in Hong Kong, Elizabeth Ho

Contributors
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Marie-Luise Kohlke lectures in English Literature at Swansea University, Wales, UK, with main research foci in neo-Victorianism, trauma narrative and theory, and gender and sexuality. She is the General and Founding Editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies and Series Co-Editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series.

Christian Gutleben is Professor at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. His research focuses on the links between these two historical periods and traditions, and he is the author of one of the earliest critical surveys of neo-Victorian literature, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Rodopi, 2001), as well as co-editor (with Susana Onega) of Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film (Rodopi, 2004).