In the introduction to the special issue of the Journal Neo-Victorian Studies, entitled ‘Neo-Victorianism and Feminism: New Approaches’, the editors Tara MacDonald and Joyce Goggin emphasise how “it is striking that neo-Victorian narratives typically contain little in the way of feminist collectives and communities”.
Monsters Born in the Full Spate of the Industrial Revolution
Monsters are born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. It is for just this reason that Dracula and Frankenstein, with rare exceptions, do not appear together. The threat would be too great, and this literature, having produced terror, must also erase it and restore peace. It must restore the broken equilibrium — giving the illusion of being able to stop history — because the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous. His antagonist — the enemy of the monster — will always be, by contrast, a representative of the present, a distillation of complacent nineteenth-century mediocrity: nationalistic, stupid, superstitious, philistine, impotent, self-satisfied. But this does not show through.
Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction Deadly Husbands and Deviant Widows
In outlining the scope of the academic Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke describes neo–Victorianism as “the contemporary fascination with reimagining the nineteenth-century and its varied literary, artistic, socio-political and historical contexts”; this fascination is “perhaps most evident in the proliferation of so-called neo-Victorian novels” (‘Aims and Scopes’).
Sigmund Freud and the Bataillean Interpretation of Death
Although it has received relatively little attention, ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death,’ published in 1915, is a fascinating discussion about our attitudes towards death, which comprise both a “cultural-conventional attitude” that Sigmund Freud so pertinently, almost wickedly, criticizes, and the attitude common to the unconscious and to primeval man. The cultural conventional attitude is characterized by a continual rejection of death: we put it away, refuse to talk about it, attribute it to chance events (‘Thoughts’ 291-92). For the primaeval man, and in the unconscious, death is wished for when it is the death of another but is denied as regards oneself.
The True Romantic Nature of the Greek ‘Satyricon’
The title of the ‘Satyricon Libri’ (or ‘Books of Satyrica’) is similar enough to the titles of some Greek romances such as the Ephesiaka or the Aethiopika to suggest to some the possibility that an original Greek Satyrica was a model for the Latin work.
Notes Toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic
The gothic is always with us. Certainly, it was always with the Victorians. All that black, all that crêpe. All that jet. All that swirling fog. If there is a transition in the nature of the gothic from the end of the eighteenth-century to the middle years of the nineteenth-century, it is marked by an inward turn perhaps.
The Authentic Fear of Monsters in Victorian Gothicism
Monsters are most often defined as anything that is not human and that is consequently frightening. However, that definition is oddly vague and does nothing to explain the many human “monsters” within history and literature, such as people who kill for money or do terrible things for horrible reasons. Thus, this paper explores monstrosity as a form of “otherness”; whether the individual is technically human or not does not matter as much as their actions and motivations for said actions. This is most apparent in ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’1 for, although human, Mr Hyde does numerous terrible things and would be considered a monster for doing so.
