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.
Author(s): Sarah E. Maier, Brenda Ayres, Danielle Mariann Dove
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 238
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Stuff and Things: Introducing Neo-Victorian Materialities
A Material Example: The Victorian Chaise-Longue
Objects, Things and Materiality
Things, Objects, Ephemera and Their Neo-Victorian “Lives”
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Objects and Memorabilia in Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects
Bibliography
Chapter 3: “Around the Mizzenpole”: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and African Americanising the Neo-Victorian-at-sea
The “Proximity” of Neo-slave and Neo-Victorian Fiction(s)
The Home and Unhomely of the Neo-Victorian/Neo-slave Ship
“Objects Stretching Backwards to Perhaps the Beginning of Time”
Pym and the Use of Things
The Ship’s Log and the “Making” of the Subject
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Touching, Writing, Collecting: Opium Paraphernalia and Neo-Victorian Material Culture
Neo-Victorian Material Culture Studies: Between Reflections and Re-enactments
“The Man with the Twisted Lip”
Doing Victorian Medicine: Victorian Pharmacy
Postcolonial Challenges: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner
Instruments of Civilisation
Instrumental Embodiment
Communicating Things
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6: “Wilful Phantoms”: Haunted Dress, Memory and Agentic Materiality in Colm Tóibín’s The Master
Spectral Sartorial Narratives
New Materialism and Neo-Victorianism
Dynamic Dresses in The Master
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 7: The Thing About Haunted Houses: In The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and The Haunting of Hill House
The Turn of the Screw and The Innocents
The Haunting of Hill House
Bibliography
Chapter 8: There’s Something in the Tea: Murder and Materiality in Dark Angel
Domestic Objects: Curation and Thing Theory
Sexuality and the Scaffold: The Celebrity Body of Mary Ann Cotton
Victims and Corpses: Wound Culture
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 9: Criminal Things: Sherlock Holmes’ Details of Detection and Their Neo-Victorian Revisions
Reading Things
Sherlock as a Thing
A Man Amongst/As His Things
Things Through Time(s)
Bibliography
Chapter 10: The Sleight of Hand: Appearance and Disappearance of Things in Neo-Victorian Magic
The Spirit and Magic of Things
Magi and Things
Things Controlled by Conjurer’s Patter
Victorian Agents of Things
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
The Hand Is Quicker Than the Eye
Bibliography
Index
