Populism and ideology: nineteenth-century fiction and the cinema

Richard J Hand in ‘Populism and Ideology: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Cinema’ explores the adaptation of nineteenth-century fiction into film. The focus of the chapter is on the cinematic adaptation of four extremely different yet continuingly popular texts at opposite ends of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). After outlining the legacy of the selected examples of fiction on film, Hand explores the critical issues and the ideological ramifications that surface through these adaptive processes. The dramatization of each text brings out diverse issues relating to popularization and ideology. This is particularly pertinent with the processes of both inter-cultural adoption and inter-generic transposition, such as the relocating of Austen within a contemporary Indian context, the redeployment of Conrad’s narrative within the Vietnam War and the appropriation of Shelley and James into the populist contexts of the horror genre.

Adaptive/appropriative reuse in neo-Victorian fiction: having one’s cake and eating it too

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s chapter on ‘Adaptive/Appropriate Reuse in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Having One’s Cake and Eating it Too’ argues that historical fiction writers’ persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants, and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses, and canonical works. Always constituting at least in part as a fantasy construction of ‘the Victorian’ for present-day purposes, the process of re-imagining involves not just a quasi resurrection (of nineteenth-century historical persons, fictional characters, traumas, aesthetics, values, and ideologies) but also a relational transformation – a change in nature, a conversion into something other, namely what we want ‘the Victorian’ to signify rather than what it was. Hence adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse (to borrow a term from urban planning’s approach to historic conservation) or, perhaps, appropriative reuse. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels Kohlke explores the prevalent perspectival frames and generic forms employed in neo-Victorian appropriative reuse and their divergent effects on present-day conceptions of Victorian culture.

Gruesome models: European displays of natural history and anatomy and nineteenth-century literature

In ‘Gruesome models: European Displays of Natural History and Anatomy and Nineteenth-Century Literature’ Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores the process in which from the second half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, medical museums opened their doors throughout Europe and anatomical models circulated between Italy, Germany, France and England, serving to educate professional medical audiences and thrilling lay audiences keen on freaks and fairs. The chapter argues that the popularisation of anatomy and the circulation of anatomical models and modellers, exhibitions and anatomists throughout Europe was reflected in nineteenth-century literature, from Gothic novels to realistic narratives and even children’s fiction. Looking at the impact of the material culture of medicine upon the literary field, Talairach-Vielmas examines the relationship between literature and the European anatomical culture by exploring nineteenth-century narratives from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in the first decades of the nineteenth-century to Charles Dickens’s fiction in the 1860s, analysing novels alongside travel guides and journal articles which demonstrate how the specific example of anatomy influenced the literary culture.

Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers

In ‘Reading the Gothic and Gothic Readers’ Andrew Smith outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. Smith then proceeds to explore how readers and reading, as images of self-reflection, are represented in the fin de siècle Gothic. The self-reflexive nature of the late nineteenth-century Gothic demonstrates a level of political and cultural scepticism at work in the period which, Smith argues, can be applied to recent developments in animal studies as a hitherto largely overlooked critical paradigm that can be applied to the Gothic. To that end this chapter examines representations of reading, readers, and implied readers in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), focusing on how these representations explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. An extended account of Dracula identifies ways in which these images of self-reflection relate to the presence of the inner animal and more widely the chapter argues for a way of rethinking the period within the context of animal studies via these ostensibly Gothic constructions of human and animal identities.

The global circulation of Victorian actants and ideas: liberalism and liberalisation in the niche of nature, culture, and technology

Regenia Gagnier in ‘The Global Circulation of Victorian Actants and Ideas: Liberalism and Liberalisation in the Niche of Nature, Culture, and Technology’ considers the implications for Victorian Studies suggested by recent developments in the fields of world literatures and globalization. The chapter draws attention to the global scope of Victorian literature as an actant in world affairs, as in processes of liberalization, democratization, and trade, but also to the specificity of each local environment and moment of transculturation, as witnessed by the example of Asia. Gagnier also makes a methodological intervention on behalf of interdisciplinary and intercultural studies by providing a framework to address two current problems. First, how may we, in language and literature studies, best study global processes of modernisation, democratization, and liberalization without losing the specificity of the local? Second, how may we best study the uniqueness of distinct locales where the forces of tradition and modernization meet? The actants discussed include Victorian geopolitical ideologies such as individualism, collectivism, nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

On measuring the nineteenth century

In this chapter John Schad offers a theoretical consideration of the concept of the nineteenth century, paying particular attention to how it might be measured (if it is not to be defined in simple calendrical terms). The essay takes as its primary text Walter Benjamin’s famous work The Arcades Project (1927-40), with its myriad insights into the nineteenth century, not least its claim that Paris is ‘the capital of the nineteenth century.’ Particularly important both to Benjamin and to the essay are the voices of such major nineteenth-century thinkers as Baudelaire, Proudhon, Bakunin, Michelet, Marx and Nietzsche. Schad sets these continental figures alongside various contemporaneous British figures, such as Arnold, Carlyle and Wilde to explore a number of defining themes of the century – in particular: revolution, democracy, realism, bureaucracy, the university, the death of God, the arcade, the exhibition, and the fear of hell. The chapter concludes by bringing together a number of these themes in an exploration of Poe’s seminal story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840), which, following Benjamin, is read as an allegory of the nineteenth century, seeing in its central figure not only what Baudelaire calls ‘the man of the century’ but also its very face.

Literary folk: writing popular culture in colonial Punjab, 1885–1905

In ‘Literary Folk: Writing Popular Culture in Colonial Punjab, 1885-1905’ Churnjeet Mahn explores the exchanges which took place between Indian and British cultures by exploring how writings from Punjab, which came out of complex and diverse cultural and religious contexts, were (mis)interpreted by a process of British cultural curation which erroneously formed these texts into a monolithic cannon of Punjabi folk-culture. By looking at the role played in this process by those associated with the colonial administration Mahn illustrates how acts of colonial appropriation were, in part, driven by an inability to understand the unique cultural forms of the Punjab. This chapter thus explores the ways in which Punjabi literary culture became filtered in British writing and provides a clear example of the issue of cultural exchange in the period and the factors that scholars need to take into account when examining these relationships.

Introduction

The Introduction outlines two areas. First, it provides an overview of how the field of Victorian studies has developed in a global context over the past fifty years. This includes outlining the various academic associations and their national contexts as well as the development of journal publishing outlets and websites dedicated to the period. Secondly, it provides an overview of the key discussions which have taken place in nineteenth century studies and indicates how the book seeks to develop these lines of enquiry. It also indicates how the series of which the volume is a part will also seek to commission original research into the period. It also outlines the chapters which compose the book.

True histories of the Elephant Man: storytelling and theatricality in adaptations of the life of Joseph Merrick

In this chapter Benjamin Poore takes the example of ‘The Elephant Man’ as a test case for how Victorian narratives have been developed in a neo-Victorian theatrical context. After outlining the way that a neo-Victorian stage culture has been developed Poore argues that Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man (1977) and David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man can be regarded as twin foundational texts in the modern-day repurposing of the story of Joseph Merrick. The film, originally adapted in part from the surgeon Frederick Treves’s The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923) was subsequently adapted back into a film novelization by Christine Sparks. Since the early 1980s, Merrick’s story in its various iterations has become a popular way to view nineteenth-century mores and to speculate on how far ‘we’ have come. However, Poore argues that there is a series of tensions between the lip-service paid to the condemnation of Victorian freak shows and the increasingly diverse uses, from comedy sketches to comic books, to which Merrick’s image and story are put. This chapter then considers the wider implications of the case of Merrick for nineteenth-century studies and the neo-Victorian.

‘Across the waters of this disputed ocean’: the material production of American literature in nineteenth-century Britain

Katie McGettigan in ‘“Across the waters of this disputed ocean”: The Material Production of American Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ argues that attending to the fashioning of American texts by British publishers enables us to rethink the emergence of American Literature as a material as well as an imaginative phenomenon, and one which was fashioned outside of, as much as within, America itself. This, in turn, produces new insights into the development of American national literary identity and transatlantic print culture, revealing a neglected history of transatlantic material exchange in the production of nineteenth-century American literature.