Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations

ISBN-13: 9783030025588 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 150 str.

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Opis

This Pivot examines a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, including cannibalism. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction, demonstrating how cannibalism provides a framework for understanding the genre's origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in its fiction.

Recenzje

"Neo-Victorian Cannibalism is ... an appreciated and extremely well-researched new take on neo-Victorian literature, which might be of use for anyone studying neo-Victorian fiction, adaptation theory, or any of the novels analyzed in the book." (Krisztina Jilling, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 26 (2), 2020)

Spis treści

Chapter One

Introduction: Neo-Victorian Cannibalism                                               

Chapter Two      

Contesting (Post-)colonialism: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Three Neo-Victorian Rejoinders                                       

I.                   Writing back: Victorian colonialism, neo-Victorian postcolonialism

II.                Jane Eyre: The colonial, cannibal and Caribbean connection

III.             Cannibalising text: Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea

IV.             Cannibalising Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: Three neo-Victorian rejoinders

V.                Conclusion: Literary ouroboros

 

 

Chapter Three

Dickens the Cannibal Cannibalised                                      

I.                   Neo-Victorian biofiction

II.                The neo-Victorian appeal of Dickens

III.             Introducing Girl in a Blue Dress

IV.             Girl in a Blue Dress: Dickens the cannibal cannibalised

V.                Conclusion: The creation of new identities through cannibalism

 

Chapter Four

Stoker and Neo-Draculas                                            

I.                   Cannibalistic Dracula

II.                Neo-Victorian double cannibalism: textual and biographical

III.             Stoker’s authorial vulnerability

IV.             Tom Holland’s Supping with Panthers

V.                Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula

VI.             Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead

VII. Conclusion: ‘dragging their fantasies’

 

Chapter Five

Coda: Victorian Memes                            

O autorze

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is Associate Professor of English, Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the founding co-editor of the Hong Kong-based international publication, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and an editor of Hong Kong Studies, the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to Hong Kong.