This volume highlights humour’s crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour’s politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past’s invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers – including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful – producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of ‘canonical’ neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at – the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia

Preliminary Material -- The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations /Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- The Limits of Neo-Victorian History: Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and The Swan Thieves /Andrew Smith -- Reclaiming Plots: Albert Wendt's 'Prospecting' and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's Ola Nā Iwi as Postcolonial Neo-Victorian Gothic /Cheryl D. Edelson -- Monsters against Empire: The Politics and Poetics of Neo-Victorian Metafiction in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen /Sebastian Domsch -- A Bodily Metaphorics of Unsettlement: Leora Farber's Dis-Location / Re-Location as Neo-Victorian Gothic /Jeanne Ellis -- Neo-Victorian Gothic and Spectral Sexuality in Colm Tóibín's The Master /Patricia Pulham -- 'Jack the Ripper' as Neo-Victorian Gothic Fiction: Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Sallies into a Late Victorian Case and Myth /Max Duperray -- Chasing the Dragon: Bangtails, Toffs, Jack and Johnny in Neo-Victorian Fiction /Sarah E. Maier -- Neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Fantasies of Self-Abjection /Marie-Luise Kohlke -- Epistemological Rupture and the Gothic Sublime in Slouching Towards Bedlam /Van Leavenworth -- Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic /Kym Brindle -- 'Fear is Fun and Fun is Fear': A Reflexion on Humour in Neo-Victorian Gothic /Christian Gutleben -- Contributors -- Index.

This handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors’ life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives—from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness—in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.

This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the femininised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.

Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.

This edited collection explores the representations of identity in comedy and interrogates the ways in which “humorous” constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, class and disability raise serious issues about privilege, agency and oppression in popular culture. Should there be limits to free speech when humour is aimed at marginalised social groups? What are the limits of free speech when comedy pokes fun at those who hold social power? Can taboo joking be used towards politically progressive ends? Can stereotypes be mocked through their re-invocation? Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak breaks new theoretical ground by demonstrating how the way people are represented mediates the triadic relationship set up in comedy between teller, audience and butt of the joke. By bringing together a selection of essays from international scholars, this study unpacks and examines the dynamic role that humour plays in making and remaking identity and power relations in culture and society.

Women's Literary Portraits in the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Novel is a dialogical and intertextual journey through the pages of nineteenth-century novels and their modern, revisionary counterparts. It is the book not only dedicated to the readers associated with academia, but also to all literature enthusiasts, students of literature, and those readers who are fascinated by the Victorian novel, as well as by its current neo-Victorian revival. The focus of this work revolves around the literary portrayals of Victorian and neo-Victorian women who, as the authoress believes, are located in the centre of socio-cultural and historical narratives shaping both the past and the present. Nineteenth-century narratives concerning women's placement and status in the Victorian social landscape are currently revived on the pages of neo-Victorian novels, thus attesting to the unceasing interest in the bygone. While neo-Victorian revisionary fiction endows nineteenth-century women with a redemptive potential, it also exposes modern paradoxes and ambiguities connected with universal expectations towards women, what further approximates our contemporaneity to the Victorian past. While examining these socio-cultural ambivalences, the authoress celebrates Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in their attempts to thrive as individuals. Consequently, the book studies Victorian and neo-Victorian women characters in relation to their identities, unique voices and textual garments.