Neo-Victorian Cities

Marie-Luise Kohlke lectures in English Literature at Swansea University, Wales, UK, with main research foci in neo-Victorianism, trauma narrative and theory, and gender and sexuality. She is the General and Founding Editor of the peer-reviewed e-journal Neo-Victorian Studies and Series Co-Editor (with Christian Gutleben) of Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series.Christian Gutleben is Professor at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. His research focuses on the links between these two historical periods and traditions, and he is the author of one of the earliest critical surveys of neo-Victorian literature, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Rodopi, 2001), as well as co-editor (with Susana Onega) of Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film (Rodopi, 2004).

“Like the previous volumes in the “neo-Victorian series” edited by Kohlke and Gutleben, this collection includes stimulating and thought-provoking analyses not only of novels but also of various (and diverse) movies, non-literary texts, architectural projects, and other artistic works, offering readers a comprehensive view of neo-Victorian negotiations with various notions of the city. This critically solid volume is a rewarding reading experience for all those who are interested in the multiple and subtle ways through which our nineteenth-century relatives inhabit our spaces, and still continue to live with and in us.” - Saverio Tomaiulo, in: RSV – Revista di Studi Vittoriani, Vol. 40 (2017) pp. 130-137“Since the so-called ‘spatial turn’, cultural geography has become one of the most vibrant fields in cultural studies, with approaches ranging from a Benjamin-inflected urban phenomenology to approaches in urban sociology, media geography, psychogeography, cultural architecture, etc. The volume offers unique insights into both the contemporary and the Victorian urban mentality, thus contributing significantly both the Urban Studies and Neo-Victorian Studies circuits. The well-written and well-structured essays are informed by expert knowledge of relevant texts across media borders, and portray the neo-Victorian take on Victorian cities as fascinating, ever-changing palimpsest of historical narratives and practices.” – Prof. Dr. Eckart Voigts, TU Braunschweig

• ContentsTroping the Neo-Victorian City: Strategies of Reconsidering the Metropolis, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian GutlebenPART I: Capitalising on the Palimpsestic City1. Making and Unmaking ‘Marvellous Melbourne’: The Colonial City as Palimpsest in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Non-Fiction, Kate Mitchell2. Neo-Victorian Cities and the Ramifications of Global Capitalism in Ayeesha Menon’s Mumbai Chuzzlewits, Nathalie Vanfasse3. Re-imagining the Victorian Flâneur in the 1960s: The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher and Norman Cohen, Isabelle Cases4. ‘Part Barrier, Part Entrance to a Parallel Dimension’: London and the Modernity of Urban Perception, Julian WolfreysPART II: Gothicising the Metropolitan Deathscape5. Vulnerable Visibilities: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous Victorian Metropolis, Jean-Michel Ganteau6. Mapping Gothic London: Urban Waste, Class Rage and Mixophobia in Dan Simmons’s Drood, Mariaconcetta Costantini7. Neo-Victorian Cities of the Dead: Contemporary Fictions of the Victorian Cemetery, Susan K. Martin8. Londons under London: Mapping Neo-Victorian Spaces of Horror, Paul DobraszczykPART III: Romancing the Commodified Metropolis9. A Strangely Mingled Monster: Gender and Spatial Transgression in the Hardcore Metropolis of Paul Thomas’s Jekyll and Hyde, Laura Helen Marks10. Steampunking New York City in Kate and Leopold, Margaret D. Stetz11. The Ship and the Gun: The Perversity of Neo-Victorian Belfast in Glenn Patterson’s The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, Barry Sheils12. Adaptive Re-Use: Producing Neo-Victorian Space in Hong Kong, Elizabeth HoContributorsIndex