CFP: Neo-Victorian Gothic
The UK e-Journal Neo-Victorian Studies is looking for his third Edition articles on "Neo-Victorian Gothic" (via www.essenglish.org / cfp ).
Deadline: 31 July 2010
Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and degeneration in the Nineteenth Century Re-Imagined
Deadline for proposals: 31 July 2010
We invite contributions on the Neo-Victorian Gothic for the forthcoming third volume in the Neo-Victorian Studies series, to be published by Rodopi in 2012. (1847), much subsequent neo-Victorian literature has resorted to similar reworkings of Gothic motifs, as well as giving modern twists to later nineteenth-century sensation fiction. Since Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1969), which 'Revisioned' Charlotte Brontë's tropes of female persecution, imprisonment, and madness Eyre in Jane (1847), much subsequent neo-Victorian literature has resorted to similar reworking of Gothic motifs, as well as giving modern twists to later nineteenth-century sensation fiction. This collection will explore the subversive potential, but that is the ideologically conservative implications, of recycling the Gothic genre in contemporary historical fiction, film, and further aesthetic media that re-imagine the nineteenth century in Britain, its colonial territories, and other geographical settings. In her recent study of Gothic postmodernism, Maria Beville argues that it is terror which constitutes "the potent link between the gothic and the postmodern" (Gothic-postmodernism, 2009). Perhaps, then, neo-Victorianism might be said to revive the spirit of terror in order to link our post-modern "culture of death", our obsession with terror and even with terrorism (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1993), back to the angst-ridden Victorian uncertainties occasioned by socio-political and cultural metamorphoses. What is the purpose of the contemporary revival of the nineteenth-century fascination with the irrational, the mysterious and the monstrous, and what questions does it raise for subjectivity and / or ontology? as the sublime? To what extent is correct in claiming that Beville it gives birth to a new "literature of excess, not so much Aimed at historical representation, but rather the exploration of the limits of representation and the unrepresentable as the celebration of the sublime? Does such writing promote particular kinds of cultural memory and cultural Imaginaries over others and, if so, why? This volume will further explore how the neo-Gothic Victorian interacts with alternative traditions of representation, such as realism and postcolonialism, as well as psychoanalytical, gender and queer theory.
Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to the following:
• Gothic spaces: prison tropes, asylums, and nightmare cityscapes
• postcolonial Gothic and the monsters of imperialism
• Steam Punk and the Gothic
• tropes of the doppelganger or double
• Gothic adaptations (eg reworking of nineteenth-century sensation novels)
• 'Gothic Ising' historical figures
• neo-Victorian vampires, criminals, and other monsters
• the occult, spiritualist Gothic, neo-Victorian hauntings
• versions of the neo-Victorian Gothic sublime
• gender politics: old / new imperiled Femininities and Gothic heroes
• Gothic Sexualities: re-thinking degeneration, perversion, degradation and
• Problematising narrative manipulation and reader expectation / response
• neo-Victorian Gothic and the limits of representation
• postcolonial Gothic and the monsters of imperialism
• Steam Punk and the Gothic
• tropes of the doppelganger or double
• Gothic adaptations (eg reworking of nineteenth-century sensation novels)
• 'Gothic Ising' historical figures
• neo-Victorian vampires, criminals, and other monsters
• the occult, spiritualist Gothic, neo-Victorian hauntings
• versions of the neo-Victorian Gothic sublime
• gender politics: old / new imperiled Femininities and Gothic heroes
• Gothic Sexualities: re-thinking degeneration, perversion, degradation and
• Problematising narrative manipulation and reader expectation / response
• neo-Victorian Gothic and the limits of representation
Please send 300 word proposals for chapters from 8.000 to 10.000 word:
- To the series editors: Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke <mlkohlke@swansea.ac.uk>
- And Prof Christian Gutleben <Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr>
- And Prof Christian Gutleben <Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr>
by 31st July 2010th Please add a short biographical note. Completed chapters will be due by end March 2011th
