The Beast in the Closet: Interrogating the Trauma of Sibling Incest in Emma Donoghue’s Neo-Victorian Novel The Wonder

Emma Donoghue’s neo-Victorian novel The Wonder (2016) is a remarkable exploration of the Victorian era’s indifference towards the issues of woman and child safety against the heinous crimes of sexual abuse. The horror of sibling incest, which eventually develops the sense of guilt within the protagonist and gradually isolates her from the entire extrinsic world, has been taken into consideration for the analysis of the unusual narratives of tremendous shock and trauma that the novel enterprises. The paper examines incest as a trope for inflicting everlasting trauma and seeks to locate if amelioration is at all achievable for the abused ‘body’. The intended study further interrogates the placid indifference of the contemporaneous behavioural patterns of the societal institutional bodies of family, religion, and law, while encountering the forever forbidden taboo of incest.

Neo-Victorian felony – Crime narratives in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project and Ian McGuire’s The North Water

The neo-Victorian novel has been one of the most significant branches of contemporary British historical fiction for the past three decades. Thanks to works like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Sarah Waters’ trilogy Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, the genre has gained not only considerable popularity among readers, but also almost a canonical literary status. Although recent neo-Victorian fiction has been trying to find some new ways in which the genre could avoid stereotypical narratives, it still retains its most determining idiosyncrasies. One of them is an interest in the undersides of Victorian society, including the themes of violence and criminality, which is why these novels often resort to the genre of crime and detective fiction. This is also the case of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (2016), both historical novels set in Victorian Britain which were, respectively, shortlisted and longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. This paper attempts to show the different manners in which these two novels employ various forms of crime narratives so as to achieve their goal of presenting convincing and seemingly authentic insights into the more obscure aspects of the Victorian era.

Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

Ragged Fortunes and Swashbuckling Thrillers; Or, Recreating the Victorian in Young Adult Fiction 1985-2011

<p>The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical” fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics. After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London, prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own world view. Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies, they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo disturbingly through the centuries.</p>

"For the Dead cannot Shrive me Now”: Gender Violence, Precariousness and the Neo-Victorian Gothic in Katy Darby’s The Whores’ Asylum (2012)

Katy Darby’s neo-Victorian novel The Whores’ Asylum (2012) is set in Oxford in the 1880s. The Gothic plays an important role in the process of re-writing the Victorian period as a mirror of our contemporary societies where depravity and lack of humanity co-exist with modernity and civilisation. The protagonists—Stephen, Edward and Diana—are involved in the process of showing sympathy for the lives and deaths of the destitute and the dispossessed. Under the stance of Judith Butler’s theories of mourning and violence, my analysis has a two-fold aim: to discuss issues of the Victorian past such as venereal disease, prostitution and gender violence in the text, and to question to what extent the novel can be an attempt to hear the voices of the victims of sexual exploitation, giving them restoration and agency. However, my conclusion is that the text does not grant the victims of sexual exploitation real voice or agency.

Pandemic Consciousness and Narrative Perspective in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger

Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (1999 ) depicts the beginning of the 1831 cholera epidemic in Britain. The novel skilfully manipulates the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and neo-Victorian fiction to test the limits of readerly empathy and its foundations in the conception of the liberal subject as disembodied and disinterested. Although the novel seems ‘faux-Victorian’ and apparently encourages immersion in the story and identification with the central characters, metaphorical uses of language and shifting points of view disrupt such comfortable ways of reading, challenging the readers’ tendency to derive pleasure from representations of working-class suffering. Through complex characterisation of the protagonists, the factory and sex worker Gustine and the doctor Henry Chiver, the narrative exposes the violence of representation through parallels with medical discourse. This essay argues that Holman’s experimentation with narrative strategies ultimately suggests the need for a pandemic consciousness that transcends the clashing responses to the cholera epidemic and cultivates an awareness of global interdependence. The possibility of such pandemic consciousness is conveyed through ‘the Great Narration’ by the novel’s unconventional intradiegetic narrator, the working-class Dead, whose bodies were stolen by doctors for the purposes of dissection.

New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

This paper discusses the influence of feminism in the classic Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The New Woman is a feminist ideal that appeared in the 19th century, more specifically amidst the rise of the first wave of feminism. The method of research used in this study covers close reading of the source material and analyzing the characters of the novel through the perspective of the New Woman ideals. The female characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula portrayed the New Woman characteristic to some degree. Women’s independence, intellect, hyperfemininity, and hypersexuality, are some of the aspects of the movement that go against the norm and values of women in Victorian Britain, such as Mina’s “man’s brain” and Lucy’s hyperfemininity, while the Brides of Dracula provide contrast as the oppressed women with their submissive and compliant attitude towards him. Without erasing their representation of these New Woman ideals, Mina and Lucy also portrayed the complexity and dimensionality of being a woman in the Victorian era; their beauty and appeal were praised while their more “unwomanly” aspects present some threats towards men.