Appel à article : "Neo-Victorian Gothic : Horror, Violence and Degeneration in rhe Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century"

[Madeleine L.]

Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration
in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century

We invite contributions on the Neo-Victorian Gothic for the third volume in the
forthcoming Neo-Victorian Studies series, to be published by Rodopi in 2012.
Since Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1969), which ‘revisioned’ Charlotte
Brontë’s tropes of female persecution, imprisonment, and madness in Jane Eyre
(1847), much subsequent neo-Victorian literature has resorted to similar
reworkings of Gothic motifs, as well as giving modern twists to later
nineteenth-century sensation fiction. This collection will explore the
subversive potential, but also the ideologically conservative implications, of
recycling the Gothic genre in contemporary historical fiction, film, and
further aesthetic media that re-imagine the nineteenth century in Britain, its
colonial territories, and other geographical settings. In her recent study of
Gothic postmodernism, Maria Beville argues that it is terror which
constitutes “the potent link between the gothic and the postmodern” (Gothic-
postmodernism, 2009). Perhaps, then, neo-Victorianism might be said to revive
the spirit of terror in order to link our postmodern “culture of death”, our
obsession with terror and even with terrorism (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange
and Death, 1993), back to the angst-ridden uncertainties occasioned by
Victorian socio-political and cultural metamorphoses. What is the purpose of
the contemporary revival of the nineteenth-century fascination with the
irrational, the mysterious and the monstrous, and what questions does it raise
for subjectivity and/or ontology? To what extent is Beville correct in claiming
that it gives birth to a new “literature of excess”, aimed not so much at
historical representation, but rather the exploration of the limits of
representation and the celebration of the unrepresentable as the sublime? Does
such writing promote particular kinds of cultural memory and cultural
imaginaries over others and, if so, why? This volume will further explore how
the neo-Victorian Gothic interacts with alternative traditions of
representation, such as realism and postcolonialism, as well as
psychoanalytical, gender and queer theory.

Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to the following:
• Gothic spaces: prison tropes, asylums, and nightmare cityscapes
• postcolonial Gothic and the monsters of imperialism
• Steampunk and the Gothic
• tropes of the Doppelgänger or double
• Gothic adaptations (e.g. reworkings of nineteenth-century sensation
novels)
• ‘Gothicising’ historical figures
• neo-Victorian vampires, criminals, and other monsters
• the occult; spiritualist Gothic; neo-Victorian hauntings
• versions of the neo-Victorian Gothic sublime
• gender politics: old/new imperilled femininities and Gothic heroes
• Gothic sexualities: re-thinking degeneration, perversion, and
degradation
• problematising narrative manipulation and reader expectation/response
• neo-Victorian Gothic and the limits of representation

Please send 300 word proposals for 8,000-10,000 word chapters to the series
editors: Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke at m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk and Prof
Christian Gutleben at Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr by 31st July 2010. Please add
a short biographical note. Completed chapters will be due by end March 2011.