Description
Book SynopsisNeo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Stuff and Things: Introducing Neo-Victorian Materialities2. Objects and Memorabilia in Deborah Lutz’s
The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects3. “Around the Mizzenpole”: Charles Johnson’s
Middle Passage and African Americanizing the Neo-Victorian-at-sea4. Touching, Writing, Collecting: Opium Paraphernalia and Neo-Victorian Material Culture5. An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s
The Piano and Daniel Mason’s
The Piano Tuner6. “Wilful Phantoms”: Haunted Dress, Memory, and Agentic Materiality in Colm Tóibín’s
The Master7. The Thing About Haunted Houses: In
The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and
The Haunting of Hill House8. There’s Something in the Tea: Murder and Materiality in
Dark Angel9. Criminal Things: Sherlock Holmes’ Details of Detection and Their Neo-Victorian Revisions10. The Sleight of Hand: Appearance and Disappearance of Things in Neo-Victorian Magic
