Neo-Victorian Studies
type: channel
description: This journal's enterprise is temporally double, staging an encounter between the Victorian and neo-Victorian, between the two periods' aesthetic productions and material works, their discourses, ideologies, and socio-political contexts. It explores themes of modernity, alterity, and evolution through time and place in an ever more globalised and interconnected world. Two ages of literature and the arts reflect and converse with each other, the nineteenth century dreaming into the future, our own present moment reading and re-imagining the past, conjoined in an ever-changing interplay of light and shadows, visibility and obscurity, self and doubled other. Neo-Victorian Studies is hosted by Swansea University, Wales, UK
publisher: Swansea University
language: en
publication name: Neo-Victorian Studies
issn: 1757-9481
items: Notes on Contributors
items: Neo-Victorian Art
items: Short-Storying Neo-Victorian Contagion:
items: Nationalistic Contagion in Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker’s Dracul:
items: “This contrived Quarantine”:
items: “The Plague swept through here”:
items: Diagnosing Disease:
items: The (Neo-)Victorian Sherlock Holmes Paradigm
items: Infectious Reimagining:
items: Viral Monsters:
items: A Detective Made of Stern Stuff
items: George Eliot’s Private Lives and Public Persona
items: The Affective Affordances of Victorian Women
items: Neo-Victorian Orientations towards the Fictional Writer
items: Retelling, Reliving
items: An (Auto)Biofictional (Re )Writing of a Brontë Classic
items: Queer Heritage and Strategic Humour in Recent Screen Biofictions of Emily Dickinson
items: Neo-Victorian Girl Sleuths for Today’s Middle-Grade Readers
items: Re-Imagining the Brontë Sisters in Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës (2020) and Bella Ellis’s Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019–)
items: Fan Fictions – Victorian Celebrity Novelists and Their Contemporary Defenders
items: A Mythic Murderess for the Modern Era
items: Seeking Correspondence through Possessions
items: Things Best Left Unspoken
items: Zadie Smith and the Form of the Historical Novel
items: Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media
items: Announcements:
items: There Ain’t No Black in (Neo-)Victorianism? Oh Yes, There Is!:
items: Chase Berggrun’s R E D and Transfeminist Erasure:

Notes on Contributors
type: item
description: Notes on Contributors for NVS 15-2 (2024/2025), special issue on Neo-Victorian Contagion.
subject: Other
  topic: section
creator: Marie-Luise Kohlke
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.401

Neo-Victorian Art
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Reviews and Review Essays
  topic: section
subject: contemporary neo-Victorian art
  topic: keywords
subject: Isobel Elstob
  topic: keywords
subject: feminism
  topic: keywords
subject: historical racism
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian art exhibitions
  topic: keywords
subject: Ingrid Pollard
  topic: keywords
subject: Yinka Shonibare
  topic: keywords
subject: visual art
  topic: keywords
creator: Margaret D. Stetz
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 216
ending page: 229
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.400

Short-Storying Neo-Victorian Contagion:
type: item
description: Andrea Barrett’s neo-Victorian short story ‘Ship Fever’ (1996) portrays the catastrophic conditions on the Canadian quarantine island Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence River off the coast of Quebec in 1847 when hundreds of starving, typhus-infected Irish people, displaced by British colonial occupation and the Great Famine, arrived there in what came to be known as the coffin ships. By contracting the vast historical and geographical landscape of this episode of epidemic contagion to the small Canadian quarantine island and portraying it as the heterotopic mirror of Famine Ireland, the short story form enables a narrowing of focus on typhus as a little-understood infectious disease at a point of intensifying crisis. My close reading of the story traces the intertextual ‘web of affinities’ activated by the constellation of heterotopic sites, which also uncovers a link with George Eliot’s writing on contagion in Middlemarch (1871-1872).
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Andrea Barrett
  topic: keywords
subject: contagion
  topic: keywords
subject: dirt
  topic: keywords
subject: heterotopia
  topic: keywords
subject: the Irish diaspora
  topic: keywords
subject: the Irish Famine
  topic: keywords
subject: memory
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian short stories
  topic: keywords
subject: truth-telling
  topic: keywords
subject: typhus epidemic
  topic: keywords
creator: Jeanne Ellis
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 169
ending page: 201
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.399

Nationalistic Contagion in Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker’s Dracul:
type: item
description: Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker’s prequel/biofiction Dracul (2018) not only rewrites Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) but also inverts the relationship between foreignness and contagion. By reimagining Bram Stoker’s early childhood sickness, and fictionalising a relationship with his nanny Ellen Crone, Dracul portrays contagion as an inherently localised, isolating issue, and suggests the possibility of treatment and the development of a cure as a direct result of globalism, personified in the character of Crone. Unlike other Stoker biofictions, including Dacre Stoker’s sequel Dracula: The Un-Dead (2009), which reinforce fear of reverse colonisation in Stoker’s source text, Dracul posits a direct correlation between global interconnectedness and remedy. This inverted relationship is particularly resonant in relation to the isolationist rhetoric that emerged during the 2020-2023 COVID-19 pandemic.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: J. D. Barker
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: global contagion literature
  topic: keywords
subject: COVID-19
  topic: keywords
subject: Dracul
  topic: keywords
subject: Dracula
  topic: keywords
subject: Otherness
  topic: keywords
subject: Bram Stoker
  topic: keywords
subject: Dacre Stoker
  topic: keywords
subject: vampirism
  topic: keywords
creator: Christian Gallichio
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 148
ending page: 168
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.398

“This contrived Quarantine”:
type: item
description: This article considers the heterotopic implications of what we might now term ‘local lockdown’ in Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (2000). Now newly relevant in the context of the social and cultural impact of the recent pandemic, Holman’s narrative, set in 1831 Sunderland, quarantined due to high incidence of cholera, provides a key point of comparison with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, exploring the violent potential of this isolated locality. By tracing key aspects of Michel Foucault’s definition of the ‘heterotopia’ (spatiality, temporality, and identity), I evaluate the ways in which Holman’s Sunderland speaks to twenty-first-century anxieties about the limitations and permissions of local lockdowns.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: cholera
  topic: keywords
subject: The Dress Lodger
  topic: keywords
subject: Michel Foucault
  topic: keywords
subject: heterotopia
  topic: keywords
subject: Sheri Holman
  topic: keywords
subject: isolation
  topic: keywords
subject: lockdown
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorianism
  topic: keywords
subject: quarantine
  topic: keywords
subject: violence
  topic: keywords
creator: Rosalind Crocker
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 121
ending page: 147
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.397

“The Plague swept through here”:
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: class anxieties
  topic: keywords
subject: classism
  topic: keywords
subject: contagion
  topic: keywords
subject: disease
  topic: keywords
subject: Dishonored
  topic: keywords
subject: immersion
  topic: keywords
subject: presence
  topic: keywords
subject: spatial explorability
  topic: keywords
subject: The Order: 1886
  topic: keywords
subject: video games
  topic: keywords
creator: Sarah E. Beyvers
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 94
ending page: 120
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.396

Diagnosing Disease:
type: item
description: This article discusses the representation of contagious diseases in Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music (2014) and Michael Nava’s The City of Palaces (2014). It argues that, in the two texts, disease is used to illuminate instances of discrimination and exclusion in the nineteenth century, thus inviting a consideration of the issue of (non)belonging then and now, as well as within neo-Victorianism. In particular, the article aims to show that the two texts utilise disease to shed light over the abjection of particular ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, and that in doing so they allude to contemporary issues of exclusion. Furthermore, the two texts employ disease to suggest connections between these abjected Others and the female protagonists, emphasising that the latter too are vulnerable to arbitrary violence from various figures of authority as a result of their sociopolitical disempowerment. Finally, the article raises questions about the ethics of mediating the experiences of marginalised communities through the perspectives of those with greater societal privilege, and discusses the implications of this narrative strategy for neo-Victorian fiction and scholarship. Emma Donoghue, Frog Music, Michael Nava, neo-Victorian, precarity, vulnerability
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: abjection
  topic: keywords
subject: The City of Palaces
  topic: keywords
subject: discrimination
  topic: keywords
subject: disease
  topic: keywords
subject: Emma Donoghue
  topic: keywords
subject: Frog Music
  topic: keywords
subject: Michael Nava
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian
  topic: keywords
subject: precarity
  topic: keywords
subject: vulnerability
  topic: keywords
creator: Georgia Ntola
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 62
ending page: 93
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.395

The (Neo-)Victorian Sherlock Holmes Paradigm
type: item
description: Scientists, epidemiologists and medical researchers, who in their past studies on Coronavirus focused on the detection of its origin and on tracing back the trail of contagion, often compared their activity to Sherlock Holmes’s investigations. In particular, references to Sherlock Holmes occurred in some Chinese medical reports, which alluded to this well-known literary and cultural icon to suggest the international relevance of the battle against COVID-19. In this respect, Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’ (1913), a short story in which Holmes is (seemingly) infected by a deadly tropical disease, may be seen as an expression of what I call ‘the Sherlock Holmes Paradigm’. This paradigm identifies the investigator’s fight against disease and infection coming from outside the margins of the British empire; at the same time, the detective’s investigations lead to the awareness that these infections are not necessarily caused by an ‘external’ source but originate within the boundaries of the British Empire. ‘The Sherlock Holmes Paradigm’ has also been adopted and updated in a series of neo-Victorian texts that directly or indirectly borrow elements from Holmes’s adventures: from David Stuart Davies’s Sherlock Holmes: The Shadow of the Rat (2010) to Tom Holland’s Supping with Panthers (1996) and George Mann’s The Affinity Bridge (2008); in these novels, Sherlock Holmes and Holmesian investigators have to face diseases contaminating London, proving that the scientific methods used by Doyle’s detective are an extremely useful approach in both medical and literary discourse, in particular as regards the complex relationship between the ideas of ‘centre’ and ‘margins’.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: The Affinity Bridge
  topic: keywords
subject: Coronavirus
  topic: keywords
subject: David Stuart Davies
  topic: keywords
subject: disease
  topic: keywords
subject: Arthur Conan Doyle
  topic: keywords
subject: Tom Holland
  topic: keywords
subject: Sherlock Holmes
  topic: keywords
subject: Sherlock Holmes: The Shadow of the Rat
  topic: keywords
subject: George Mann
  topic: keywords
subject: Supping with Panthers
  topic: keywords
creator: Saverio Tomaiuolo
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 1
ending page: 31
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.394

Infectious Reimagining:
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: contagion
  topic: keywords
subject: disciplinary regimes of power
  topic: keywords
subject: disease metaphors
  topic: keywords
subject: The Disinvited Guest
  topic: keywords
subject: ethics of care
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian
  topic: keywords
subject: Nights of Plague
  topic: keywords
subject: Othering
  topic: keywords
subject: Sherlock Holmes
  topic: keywords
subject: viropolitics
  topic: keywords
creator: Mel Kohlke
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: i
ending page: xxix
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.393

Viral Monsters:
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: adaptation
  topic: keywords
subject: contagion
  topic: keywords
subject: frankenstein
  topic: keywords
subject: The Frankenstein Chronicles
  topic: keywords
subject: Gothic
  topic: keywords
subject: monstrosity
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian studies
  topic: keywords
subject: Penny Dreadful
  topic: keywords
subject: TV series
  topic: keywords
subject: viropolitics
  topic: keywords
creator: Alessandra Olga Grazia Serra
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 32
ending page: 61
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.392

A Detective Made of Stern Stuff
type: item
description: Review of Dominique Gracia, The Meinir Davies Casebook (2023)
subject: Reviews and Review Essays
  topic: section
creator: Saverio Tomaiuolo
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 300
ending page: 310
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11261903

George Eliot’s Private Lives and Public Persona
type: item
description: Eliot’s literary afterlife is not such a widespread phenomenon as Dickens’s afterlife. Fictions rewriting Eliot have exploited the author’s unconventional life and been studied as melodramas, while more recently, Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch (2014) and Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl (2015) have proven more ambitious by welding biographical data with celebrity biofiction. This article adds Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love with George Eliot (2019) to the two above-mentioned works to investigate their generic fluidity, from auto/biography to autobiografiction. Even if there is a core of ascertained facts concerning the historical figure that are found almost unchanged in the three texts, the shift from Eliot as Eminent Victorian to her postmodern textual inscription as neo-character reveals dissonant facets. The resulting composite kaleidoscope borrows from diverse epistemological fields: historiography, literary romanticism, visual and material culture, or even musicology. Authorship is explored from a whole spectrum, ranging from the financial management of an artist career to the cult of numinous inspiration. The common feature between these three different revisionist texts, however, lies in their attempt to democratise Eliot’s magisterial voice.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: auto/biography
  topic: keywords
subject: biografiction
  topic: keywords
subject: frame-breaking
  topic: keywords
subject: George Eliot
  topic: keywords
subject: genre fluidity
  topic: keywords
subject: intersemiotic crossovers
  topic: keywords
subject: Marianolatry
  topic: keywords
subject: transfiction
  topic: keywords
creator: Georges Letissier
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 245
ending page: 274
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11212123

The Affective Affordances of Victorian Women
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: affect
  topic: keywords
subject: creative memoir
  topic: keywords
subject: Elizabeth Gaskell
  topic: keywords
subject: experiential criticism
  topic: keywords
subject: feminist literary criticism
  topic: keywords
subject: personal voice
  topic: keywords
subject: recognition
  topic: keywords
subject: Nell Stevens
  topic: keywords
subject: The Victorian and the Romantic
  topic: keywords
subject: women writers
  topic: keywords
creator: Lana Dalley
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 223
ending page: 244
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11209792

Neo-Victorian Orientations towards the Fictional Writer
type: item
description: Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006) narrates the story of Bessy Buckley, an Irish girl who searches for work and finds it in Castle Haivers, employed by Arabella Reid. The novel unfolds an unexpected course of actions, which will shift Bessy’s position from being a vulnerable subject to a resilient one through storytelling. Bessy becomes a writer with a voice of her own, but also finds strength. This essay focuses on the character of Bessy, a maid who pens her story, thus becoming a writer, but who also achieves improvement through friendship, bonding, and care. Also, the maid’s disorienting voice complicates any reading of the novel as it paradoxically engages with the reader’s desire for the truth, as well as with the constructed nature of her piece of life-writing. Ultimately, in The Observations, the act of writing (and reading) is then coupled with ethics of care in a Victorian context through a contemporary lens.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: care
  topic: keywords
subject: Jane Harris
  topic: keywords
subject: maid
  topic: keywords
subject: The Observations
  topic: keywords
subject: orientation
  topic: keywords
subject: recognition
  topic: keywords
subject: resilience,
  topic: keywords
subject: storytelling
  topic: keywords
subject: trauma
  topic: keywords
subject: women's writing
  topic: keywords
creator: Rosario Arias
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 203
ending page: 222
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11151969

Retelling, Reliving
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: autobiography
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Rupert Everett
  topic: keywords
subject: fairytale
  topic: keywords
subject: film
  topic: keywords
subject: ‘The Happy Prince’ (1888)
  topic: keywords
subject: The Happy Prince (2018)
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian adaptation
  topic: keywords
subject: Oscar Wilde
  topic: keywords
creator: Amanda Farage
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 160
ending page: 183
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11127519

An (Auto)Biofictional (Re )Writing of a Brontë Classic
type: item
description: Alison Case’s Nelly Dean (2016) is in many ways typical of the numerous re-writings of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In this contemporary novel, constructed as a monologic epistolary retelling of its famous hypotext, Nelly is given the opportunity to tell Mr. Lockwood her side of the story, as well as to provide new information about her relationships to the other characters, especially Hindley Earnshaw. Moreover, the double interrogation of who exactly Nelly is writing for and why she is writing looms larger and larger as the story develops. This article focuses on the analysis of this self-reflexivity and on the promotion of Nelly Dean from second-hand narrator in Wuthering Heights to writer of her own biography in Case’s eponymous novel.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: (auto)biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Emily Brontë
  topic: keywords
subject: Alison Case
  topic: keywords
subject: coquel
  topic: keywords
subject: epistolary novel
  topic: keywords
subject: Nelly Dean
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian
  topic: keywords
subject: re-writing
  topic: keywords
subject: Wuthering Heights
  topic: keywords
creator: Isabelle Roblin
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 184
ending page: 202
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11148470

Queer Heritage and Strategic Humour in Recent Screen Biofictions of Emily Dickinson
type: item
description: The article discusses three latest screen portrayals of Emily Dickinson, namely Terence Davies’s biopic A Quiet Passion (2016), Madeleine Olnek’s independent biographical comedy Wild Nights with Emily (2018), and Alena Smith’s Apple TV+ teen series Dickinson (2019-2021), examining to what extent these texts can be termed neo-Victorian biofictions. The article focuses on the latter two screen products, which are analysed as queer and self-reflexive biofictions, questioning and subverting the dominant cultural image of the poet as a reclusive writer and thinker, and portraying her in an irreverent and often humorous way. Their respective creators both chose to make Dickinson’s love affair with her sister-in-law the driving force of the plot, demythologising the poet and claiming her as an icon of queer heritage. In turn, Terence Davies’s 2016 biopic is treated as a counterfoil to the other two, by virtue of its startlingly conservative and heteronormative agenda. Furthermore, the article discusses the use of humour as a strategy in queer biofiction, and finally it analyses how Olnek’s and Smith’s projects deploy romantic comedy tropes in their presentation of the romance between Emily Dickinson and Sue Gilbert.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: A Quiet Passion
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: biomythography
  topic: keywords
subject: Dickinson
  topic: keywords
subject: Emily Dickinson
  topic: keywords
subject: Susan Gilbert Dickinson
  topic: keywords
subject: post-authenticity
  topic: keywords
subject: queer heritage
  topic: keywords
subject: queer humour
  topic: keywords
subject: Wild Nights with Emily
  topic: keywords
creator: Barbara Braid
creator: Anna Gutowska
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 126
ending page: 159
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11085067

Neo-Victorian Girl Sleuths for Today’s Middle-Grade Readers
type: item
description: Middle-grade readers, those aged eight to twelve, encounter lessons in feminism through a range of neo-Victorian mystery novels featuring girl sleuths. This essay shines light on two such series that offer exciting adventure narratives couched within biofiction. Jordan Stratford’s Wollstonecraft Detective Agency series (2015-2018) gleefully bends chronological dates to allow a young Mary Godwin (later Shelley) to befriend Ada Byron (later Lovelace); the series’ four novels infill the thought-lives of these young writers, depicting them as creators of knowledge even during the period of their juvenilia. Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes series (2006-present) uses life-writing to give voice to a Victorian girl’s perspectives on the burdens of living in a patriarchal culture. The girls’ cases develop a lineage of great Victorian women figures like Mary Somerville, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Florence Nightingale, women who are introduced within the context of their published work. The article further examines how women characters write in code as a way to communicate knowledge seen as deviant by patriarchal systems.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: adaptation
  topic: keywords
subject: agency
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: children’s literature
  topic: keywords
subject: detective fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Enola Holmes Mysteries series
  topic: keywords
subject: feminism
  topic: keywords
subject: Ada Lovelace
  topic: keywords
subject: Mary Shelley
  topic: keywords
subject: Wollstonecraft Detective Agency series
  topic: keywords
creator: Tara Moore
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 100
ending page: 125
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11075421

Re-Imagining the Brontë Sisters in Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës (2020) and Bella Ellis’s Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019–)
type: item
description: Reconstructions of the Brontë sisters as exceptional women, worthy of empathy and admiration by twenty-first-century readers, increasingly rely on the entanglements of the sisters’ literary ambitions and limiting contemporary gender roles. By relying on visual and topical appeals in the form of graphic novels and detective stories, neo-Victorian adaptations of the Brontës further broaden the dimension of biofiction (and vice versa). As instances of popular literature, Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town (2020) and Bella Ellis’s (aka Rowan Coleman’s) Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019–) present creative approaches to and engagements with the Brontës, indicating that for a contemporary readership, interest in the authors as protofeminist characters proves to be just as important as interest in their literary oeuvre.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: adaptation
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: the Brontës
  topic: keywords
subject: Rowan Coleman
  topic: keywords
subject: detective fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Bella Ellis
  topic: keywords
subject: feminism
  topic: keywords
subject: graphic novel
  topic: keywords
subject: Isabel Greenberg
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian
  topic: keywords
creator: Maria Juko
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 68
ending page: 99
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10999644

Fan Fictions – Victorian Celebrity Novelists and Their Contemporary Defenders
type: item
description: If we love the work of a writer whose politics, personal behaviour and character can be shown to be alarming, disgusting or dangerous – if she, he (or they) is racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, a child-molester or an advocate of selective murder – should we continue to admire their prose? This is the central question that has preoccupied my thinking about neo-Victorian biographical fictions. In this essay, I examine the tensions between three modes of writing: history, biography, and fiction and address the question of neo-Victorian critical ethics. I then proceed to discuss two biographical fictions of Victorian writers, written at the beginning of the twenty-first century in very different literary registers. The first text is Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), which dramatises the later writing years of Henry James. The second text is Kate Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001), which reinterprets the relationship between Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don who became Lewis Carroll, and his child Muse, Alice Liddell. Neither of these novels were consciously written as neo-Victorian biographical fictions, yet both address the question of biographical ethics and judgements. Do we write to defend the writers we love against all comers, or to judge them in the light of contemporary morals and literary aesthetics? Or are we simply rewriting them in our own image?
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Alice Liddell
  topic: keywords
subject: biographical fiction
  topic: keywords
subject: bodies
  topic: keywords
subject: critical ethics
  topic: keywords
subject: fanfiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Henry James
  topic: keywords
subject: history
  topic: keywords
subject: Lewis Carroll
  topic: keywords
subject: presentism
  topic: keywords
subject: resurrection
  topic: keywords
creator: Patricia Duncker
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 275
ending page: 299

A Mythic Murderess for the Modern Era
type: item
description: Review of Sarah Leavitt, Agnes, Murderess
subject: Reviews and Review Essays
  topic: section
creator: Shannon Scott
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 311
ending page: 329
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11276157

Notes on Contributors
type: item
description: Notes on Contributors for NVS 15:1, special issue on Beyond Biofiction
subject: Other
  topic: section
creator: NVS NVS Editorial Team
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 330
ending page: 335
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.11366557

Seeking Correspondence through Possessions
type: item
description: This article offers an examination of biographical and literary approaches to rereading and rewriting the Brontës, particularly the way in which the figures of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre rematerialise in contemporary fiction. It considers the way that this presence is figured through the material legacy of the Brontës, focusing on two recent works – Catherine Lowell’s The Madwoman Upstairs (2016) and Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015). In Lowell’s novel, Brontë relics represent an association with death and loss, the material object emptied out and carrying the aura of emptiness and grief. Conversely, in her biography, Lutz uses the same objects to summon a lived sense of the Brontës. The two texts, one non-fiction, the other a novel, are characterised by a fascination with the lives and works of the Brontës and an interplay between fanfiction and literary criticism relating to the context of their writing and biographies. Both books summon the ghosts of the Brontës through depiction of the sisters’ possessions and their writing, as well as acts of writing in Jane Eyre (1847), in order to explore the individual stories the objects tell as well as the ones they conceal.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Charlotte Brontë
  topic: keywords
subject: possessions
  topic: keywords
subject: fanfiction
  topic: keywords
subject: Jane Eyre
  topic: keywords
subject: Catherine Lowell
  topic: keywords
subject: Deborah Lutz7
  topic: keywords
subject: neo-Victorian
  topic: keywords
subject: reading
  topic: keywords
subject: objects
  topic: keywords
subject: writing desks
  topic: keywords
creator: Lucy Sheerman
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 38
ending page: 67
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10826208

Things Best Left Unspoken
type: item
description: Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale: Or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) is based on flashbacks concerning Edward Driffield, a recently deceased Victorian author, who is partly based on Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Alroy Kear, a fictional representation of Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) and author of a planned account of Driffield’s life, insists that everything should not be told in the biography, suggesting that some things may be better left unsaid. In a prefiguration of the self-reflexivity of postmodernism, the narrator, Ashenden – Maugham’s own persona – expands on the value of the first-person narrative, raising questions of reliability. Thus, the representation of the three author-characters becomes a means to deconstruct the myth surrounding the figure of the writer. Indeed, the reader is led to question what makes the reputation and worth of an author, as Maugham proposes a critical assessment of the process of idealisation of the Victorian author figure, from the relatively brief temporal distance of some forty years.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: author figure
  topic: keywords
subject: biofiction
  topic: keywords
subject: biography
  topic: keywords
subject: Cakes and Ale
  topic: keywords
subject: Thomas Hardy
  topic: keywords
subject: Somerset Maugham
  topic: keywords
subject: reputation
  topic: keywords
subject: unreliability
  topic: keywords
subject: Victorian literature
  topic: keywords
subject: Hugh Walpole
  topic: keywords
creator: Julie Depriester
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 18
ending page: 37
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10825621

Zadie Smith and the Form of the Historical Novel
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Reviews and Review Essays
  topic: section
subject: blackness
  topic: keywords
subject: The Fraud
  topic: keywords
subject: the historical novel
  topic: keywords
subject: historicity
  topic: keywords
subject: multicultural pasts
  topic: keywords
subject: myth of progress
  topic: keywords
subject: narrative form
  topic: keywords
subject: slavery
  topic: keywords
subject: Zadie Smith
  topic: keywords
subject: the Tichborne affair
  topic: keywords
creator: Benjamin O'Dell
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-04-26
publication date: 2025-04-26
starting page: 202
ending page: 215
doi: 10.5281/nvs.v15i2.369

Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media
type: item
description: Guest Editors' introduction to the 15:1 Special Issue: Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media (2023/2024)
subject: Articles
  topic: section
creator: Armelle Parey
creator: Charlotte Wadoux
rights: Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2024-06-07
publication date: 2024-06-07
starting page: 1
ending page: 17
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10825220

Notes on Contributors
type: item
description: Neo-Victorian Studies 14:1 (2021/2022)
subject: Other
  topic: section
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2023-06-23
publication date: 2023-06-23
starting page: 313
ending page: 315

Announcements:
type: item
description: Neo-Victorian Studies 14:1 (2021/2022)
subject: Other
  topic: section
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2023-06-23
publication date: 2023-06-23
starting page: 281
ending page: 312

There Ain’t No Black in (Neo-)Victorianism? Oh Yes, There Is!:
type: item
description: Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Marlena Tronicke and Julian Wacker (eds.), Black Neo-Victoriana. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2022. ISBN: 978-90-04-46914-3 £ 93.00
subject: Reviews and Review Essays
  topic: section
creator: Nadine Boehm-Schnitker
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2023-06-23
publication date: 2023-06-23
starting page: 246
ending page: 260

Chase Berggrun’s R E D and Transfeminist Erasure:
type: item
description: This article examines how the lyric speaker of Chase Berggrun’s poetry collection R E D (2018) composes herself from the multiple narrative voices of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Berggrun uses erasure as both an embodied and a textual practice in order to record the testimony of a survivor of gender-based violence. An experiment in generic and temporal transformation, R E D is best analysed through the lens of trans studies as its author extends queer and feminist readings of Dracula.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Chase Berggrun
  topic: keywords
subject: Dracula
  topic: keywords
subject: erasure
  topic: keywords
subject: feminism
  topic: keywords
subject: poetics
  topic: keywords
subject: queer
  topic: keywords
subject: R E D
  topic: keywords
subject: Bram Stoker
  topic: keywords
subject: trans studies
  topic: keywords
subject: transgender
  topic: keywords
creator: Eleanor Reeds
rights: Copyright (c) 2023 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2023-06-23
publication date: 2023-06-23
starting page: 212
ending page: 231