Neo-Victorianism as a Cemetery: Heterotopia and Heterochronia in Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels and Audrey Neffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry

This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a discussion of the cemetery as a governing metaphor to describe neo-Victorianism, as it is a highly heterotopic and heterochronic space. A hauntological approach is applied to interpret the attempt to bury the spectre of Victorianism in Michel de Certeau’s “scriptural tombs” as the main project of neo-Victorianism. Two neo-Victorian novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), are selected as illustrations of this phenomenon, as they both focus on Highgate Cemetery in London as a key element of their narratives. Both these texts show that neo-Victorianism, conceptualised as a cemetery, is a heterotopic and heterochronic archive of the spectres that rarely stay buried in their narrative tombs.

The Gothic Representations of the City through the Fl?neur in Victorian Literature

The Victorian Gothic moved away from old and conventional themes and spaces of early Gothic novels such as ruined castles and evil villains into more realistic spaces and characters that went hand in hand with the issues of the era. While the conventional Gothic space centered on the castle or other forms of old buildings, the city was an important component in Victorian Gothic imagery. In an era of growing mediation between the city and the urban dwellers, the gothic representations of the urban space in Victorian literature highly depended on the 'eye' of the its fl?neurs, or walkers who see, interpret, and produce the city. The fascination with modes of perceiving and seeing the mystery of the puzzling visual experience are evident in a wide variety of the nineteenth and twentieth-century theories and researches on the urban space. The focus of this paper is to graft some insights into debate on urban visuality and other related tropes that provide a range of perspectives on the field of the visual and perception of the city. Then, drawing from Victorian novels, this paper examines Dickens’s portrayals of urban subjects such as Gothic fl?neurs who produce the city as a Gothic place.

Fact and fiction : representations of prostitution in contemporary British news media and novels

Prostitution remains a controversial issue in the United Kingdom. The period of 2000 to 2009 saw a range of disparate solutions, from legalization to abolition, debated by policy makers and feminists and covered extensively in the news media. The debates raised questions about the public's rights, the treatment of prostitution as a legitimate form of work in the liberal economy, the limits on women's choice to enter sex work, and the extent of violence and harm experienced by sex workers. Definitions of prostitution are enacted via a complex relationship between legal and cultural discourses. The media uses certain tropes that create discursive boundaries in the debates. The first principal research question is, "How are competing discourses of prostitution conveyed in contemporary British news media?" The project provides an empirical analysis of the competing constructions of prostitution in British news media over the last decade, focusing on the depiction of sex workers, clients and the phenomenon of prostitution generally. Previous operationalizations of Habermas' theory of communication suggest that it is an effective approach for revealing distortions in media discourses. The study operationalized the validity claims of Truth, Sincerity and Legitimacy and systematically applied them to a sample of 342 articles from The Daily Mail and The Guardian, theoretically representing both the popular political right- and left-leaning framings of issues. Key findings of this project were that many media discourses are distorted compared to empirical realities, and that they are often expressed in dualisms and dichotomies. Media constructions of prostitution also reflect long-standing cultural themes. Nineteenth-century discourses of prostitutes as "fallen" -- simultaneously doomed victims and immoral seducers -- also appeared in many of the media characterizations of sex workers today. Finally, the dissertation argues that the neo-Victorian novels of Michel Faber and Sarah Waters consider prostitution with particular attention of the persistent historical cultural tropes. A second key finding of the project is that literature provides alternative ways of conceptualizing questions of "choice" and "harm." By including an examination of literature, the dissertation explores alternative, more nuanced perspectives that may allow superior understandings of the phenomenon than many of the "factual" media accounts.

Fact and fiction : representations of prostitution in contemporary British news media and novels

Prostitution remains a controversial issue in the United Kingdom. The period of 2000 to 2009 saw a range of disparate solutions, from legalization to abolition, debated by policy makers and feminists and covered extensively in the news media. The debates raised questions about the public's rights, the treatment of prostitution as a legitimate form of work in the liberal economy, the limits on women's choice to enter sex work, and the extent of violence and harm experienced by sex workers. Definitions of prostitution are enacted via a complex relationship between legal and cultural discourses. The media uses certain tropes that create discursive boundaries in the debates. The first principal research question is, "How are competing discourses of prostitution conveyed in contemporary British news media?" The project provides an empirical analysis of the competing constructions of prostitution in British news media over the last decade, focusing on the depiction of sex workers, clients and the phenomenon of prostitution generally. Previous operationalizations of Habermas' theory of communication suggest that it is an effective approach for revealing distortions in media discourses. The study operationalized the validity claims of Truth, Sincerity and Legitimacy and systematically applied them to a sample of 342 articles from The Daily Mail and The Guardian, theoretically representing both the popular political right- and left-leaning framings of issues. Key findings of this project were that many media discourses are distorted compared to empirical realities, and that they are often expressed in dualisms and dichotomies. Media constructions of prostitution also reflect long-standing cultural themes. Nineteenth-century discourses of prostitutes as "fallen" -- simultaneously doomed victims and immoral seducers -- also appeared in many of the media characterizations of sex workers today. Finally, the dissertation argues that the neo-Victorian novels of Michel Faber and Sarah Waters consider prostitution with particular attention of the persistent historical cultural tropes. A second key finding of the project is that literature provides alternative ways of conceptualizing questions of "choice" and "harm." By including an examination of literature, the dissertation explores alternative, more nuanced perspectives that may allow superior understandings of the phenomenon than many of the "factual" media accounts.

Utopian Socialism, Women’s Emancipation, and the Origins of Middlemarch

This chapter demonstrates that George Eliot’s investigation of the early, “utopian” socialists catalyzed the writing of perhaps the most iconic of all Victorian novels, Middlemarch (1871–2). The utopian socialists (as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, and their followers were increasingly known) frequently suggested that the transition to a new, nongovernmental social order hinged upon the emancipation of women. Their untimely calls for female liberation became newly salient with the coalescence, in the 1860s, of Britain’s first national campaign for women’s suffrage. This chapter’s reading of Middlemarch shows that socialist discourse provides Eliot a rich symbolic vocabulary with which to conduct her own novelistic investigation of the “Woman Question”—and to engage in a clandestine meditation on the claims of the suffragists. By incorporating socialist elements into her novel, Eliot could unobtrusively position herself in relation to the ideals and activities of this burgeoning movement—a movement in which a number of her closest friends were involved. Attending to Middlemarch’s socialist motif demystifies the novel’s shrouded origins and decodes a hitherto illegible record of Eliot’s proto-feminist aspirations which, like the early socialists’ own, were inextricably intertwined with skepticism about institutional politics. This chapter also provides a genealogy of “utopian socialism,” a category that has exerted a distorting influence on scholarship since Marx and Engels tarred their rivals with it in The Communist Manifesto.

Miss Jane and Miss Eyre: From student to teacher in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is considered to be one of the most significant Victorian novels within the English literary canon as well as a governess novel. However, apart from her experience as governess, it must not be forgotten that, first of all, Jane was a student. Education has shaped the protagonist’s life and the plot of the novel making it one of the main topics of Jane Eyre and other Charlotte Brontë’s literary works such as The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853). The main aim of this essay is to study how education has shaped Jane Eyre both as a student and a teacher and how it has affected the outcome of the novel. In order to do so, a close reading of the novel is carried out along with a sociocultural background of Victorian society.

Transformation of the images of woman and child in the Neo-Victorian novel (based on the novels “Florence and Giles” John Harding and “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd

Neo-Victorian novel is one of the main trends in the development of modern British literature. This article traces the transformation of the images of woman and child in the Neo-Victorian novel of the 1990 – 2010s in comparison with the Victorian pretext (the novels “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens). The research material includes the novels “Florence and Giles” John Harding and “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd. It was determines that the Neo-Victorian novel fools with the audience’s perception of stereotypical gender concepts, as well as poetics of the Victorian novel, according to which the title character, namely a woman or a child, is the object of the author’s and reader’s affinity. The article examines the role of references in the aforementioned neo-Victorian novels to the “thrilling” stories of Edgar. Poe, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson. It is revealed that the traditional “angel in the house” in the Neo-Victorian novel is transformed into the evil “Mrs. Hyde”, exacting vengeance on the world for the humiliations because of her gender and social status. The author reviews the role of intermedian references in the novel “Florence and Giles”. The conclusion is made that the dialogue with pretexts allows modern writers to touch on the topics of women's education and gender inequality in the past and present.

Kestner, J. A. (2017). Sherlock’s sisters: The British female detective, 1864–1913. New York: Routledge.

The monograph of the American scholar Joseph A. Kestner is devoted to Victorian novels and stories that feature a female detective protagonist. The author introduces a large volume of little studied texts written in the period from 1864 to 1913, which he explores to follow the process of the female detective character taking shape, noting its specific structural and sociocultural traits as well as features of narration. As a literary example and a starting point, the author considers the character of the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes: it is in comparison and polemic with him that the character of a female detective is formed in the subsequent literary tradition. In recognizing realistic prose as documentary evidence, the author painstakingly reconstructs the historical context, mostly in the area of gender issues. This enables him to shed a new light on the origins of English detective writing, while not without certain limitations.

Portrait of Women in Victorian Novels

This article examines the representation of three female characters in three Victorian novels. These three novels are Bleak house, Ruth, and Lady Audley’s Secret. This work is, in fact, a study of how women were viewed in Victorian novels which actually depicted the Victorian society. The society of that time was male-dominated that tried to rule over women unfairly and made them as submissive as possible in order to handle them easily according to their selfish tastes. If women in Victorian society followed the expectations of men thoroughly, they were called angel-in-the-house; if not, they were labeled with negative labels like fallen-woman or mad-woman. This article tries to go through the characters of Esther Summerson, Ruth, and Lady Audley who appeared in the three aforementioned novels respectively in order to prove that the Victorian Society, which was represented in the novels of that period, was a harshly male-dominated society that ruled over women with bitter patriarchy.

The “Irish” Female Servant in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood

This article examines two neo-Victorian novels by American writers—Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000)—which “write back” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), respectively. Both novels ostensibly critique the socio-cultural inequalities of Victorian London, particularly for women, immigrants, and the working class, and the gender and class politics and structures of the original texts. However, as this article demonstrates, the presence of invented Irish female servants as key figures in these “re-visionary” narratives also undermines some aspects of this critique. Despite acting as gothic heroines, figures who traditionally uncover patriarchal abuses, these servant characters also facilitate their employers’ lives and negotiations of the supernatural (with varying degrees of success), while also themselves becoming associated with gothic monstrosity, via their extended associations with Irish-Catholic violence and barbarity on both sides of the Atlantic. This article therefore argues that Irish servant figures in neo-Victorian texts by American writers function as complex signifiers of pastness and barbarity, but also of assimilation and progressive modernization. Indeed, the more “Irish” the servant, the better equipped she will be to help her employer navigate the world of the supernatural.