Brenda Ayres

Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom

The Emperor's Old Groove

The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft

Betwixt and Between

Sarah E. Maier

Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were “mad.” Such portraits demand a “rediagnosing” of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.

Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media

Neo-Victorian Madness

Over the course of her 57-year career, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson published nine best-selling novels, but her significant contributions to American literature have until recently gone largely unrecognized. Brenda Ayres, in her long overdue critical biography of the novelist once referred to as the 'first Southern woman to enter the field of American letters,' credits the importance of Wilson's novels for their portrait of nineteenth-century America. As Ayres reminds us, the nineteenth-century American book market was dominated by women writers and women readers, a fact still to some extent obscured by the make-up of the literary canon. In placing Wilson's novels firmly within their historical context, Ayres commemorates Wilson as both a storyteller and maker of American history. Proceeding chronologically, Ayres devotes a chapter to each of Wilson's novels, showing how her views on Catholicism, the South, the Civil War, male authority, domesticity, Reconstruction, and race were both informed by and resistant to the turbulent times in which she lived. This comprehensive and meticulously researched biography contributes not only to our appreciation of Wilson's work, but also to her importance as a figure for understanding women's roles in history and their art, evolving gender roles, and the complicated status of women writers.

The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835-1909

Sarah Elizabeth Maier

Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the "proper way" of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals in literature taught Victorian children how to be behave. If you are a postmodern posthumanist, you might argue, "But the animals in literature did not write their own accounts." Animal characters may be the creations of writers’ imagination, but animals did and do exist in their own right, as did and do humans. The original essays in Animals and Their Children in Victorian explore the representation of animals in children’s literature by resisting an anthropomorphized perception of them. Instead of focusing on the domestication of animals, this book analyzes how animals in literature "civilize" children, teaching them how to get along with fellow creatures—both human and nonhuman.

Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. The woman was supposed to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed by the advice books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to "proper" behavior. In an age when fiction was seen as a vehicle for propagating moral and behavioral norms, the Victorian novels frequently presented the woman as the angel in the home. On the surface, Dickens' novels certainly advance the view that women should be subordinate to men. But on closer look, Dickens' works also challenge the Victorian conceptions of how women should behave. This book provides an illuminating analysis of how the Dickens text modifies and subverts conventional Victorian ideology through a convoluted characterization of women that fails to promote domesticity.

The Subversion of Domestic Ideology

Dissenting Women in Dickens' Novels

Danielle Mariann Dove

Neo-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.

Re-imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film

Neo-Victorian Things

Some of the greatest English novels were written during the Victorian era, and many are still widely read and taught today. But many others written during that period have been neglected by scholars and modern readers alike. With the increasing interest in revising Victorian history and gender scholarship, especially through the rediscovery of lost texts written by women, this book is a timely and much needed study. The expert contributors discuss novels by such Victorian women writers as Grace Aguilar, Catherine Crowe, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Annie E. Holdsworth, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Flora Annie Steel, Anne Thackeray, Sarah Grand, Marie Corelli, and others. These novels reveal perspectives of 19th-century British culture not present in canonized works and therefore revise our understanding of Victorian life and attitudes.

Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers

Silent Voices

This is the first collection to investigate Charles Dickens on his vast and various opinions about the uses and abuses of the tenets of Christian faith that imbue English Victorian culture. Although previous studies have looked at his well-known antipathies toward Dissenters, Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews, they have also disagreed about Dickens’ thoughts on Unitarianism and speculated on doctrines of Protestantism that he endorsed or rejected. Besides addressing his depiction of these religious groups, the volume’s contributors locate gaps in scholarship and unresolved illations about poverty and charity, representations of children, graveyards, labor, scientific controversy, and other social issues through an investigation of Dickens’ theological concerns. In addition, given that Dickens’ texts continue to influence every generation around the globe, a timely inclusion in the collection is a consideration of the neo-Victorian multi-media representations of Dickens’ work and his ideas on theological questions pitched to a postmodern society.

The Theological Dickens

Carolyn W de la L Oulton

Alexandra Warwick

Karen Yuen

Contains three early examples of the genre of New Woman writing, each portraying women in ways wholly different to those which had gone before. This title includes "Kith and Kin" (1881), "Miss Brown" and "The Wing of Azrael".

New Woman Fiction, 1881-1899, Part I

The Typology of Red Hair Throughout the Literary and Visual Arts

A Vindication of the Redhead

This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written.

A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century

Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers

Novelist Marie Corelli was extremely popular at the turn of the century, so much so that J. M. Stuart-Young complained about the ‘Corelli Cult’. Corelli broke all sales records during the 30 years of her publishing. Her books have enjoyed a resurgence of interest over the past two decades for various reasons but ostensibly due to their challenge to gender constrictions. Corelli’s perception of gender and her gender demeanor were complicated and mercurial. Speculation that she was transgendered, a deduction drawn from her writing and from her having lived in an intimate relationship with Bertha Vyver for 64 years, makes her a person of interest today. Additionally, her 30 novels, short stories and essays are all in print and they reflect a myriad of themes and experiences as relevant today, if not more so, than during the late Victorian period. So far, other than a special issue of ‘Women’s Writing’ in 2006, no collection of essays on Corelli has been published. ‘Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century’ is the first to remedy that, prompted by her current popularity, a desire to introduce her to a new generation and to instigate critical inquiry that will offer an appreciation for her themes, style and historical place in the literary canon.

Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century

'Neo-Gothic Narratives' defines and theorises what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times.

Illusory Allusions from the Past

Neo-Gothic Narratives

‘Neo-Gothic Narratives’ defines and theorises what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

Argues that the Disney company's version of multiculturalism is really the same "old groove"--a surreptitious colonizing force that manipulates the psychological, cultural, and political identitites of consumers, predominantly children. [back cover].

Brenda Ayres

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