Neo-Victorian Things Re-imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film

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.

1. Introduction: Stuff and Things: Introducing Neo-Victorian Materialities.- 2. Objects and Memorabilia in Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects.- 3. “Around the Mizzenpole”: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and African Americanizing the Neo-Victorian-at-sea.- 4. Touching, Writing, Collecting: Opium Paraphernalia and Neo-Victorian Material Culture.- 5. An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner.- 6. “Wilful Phantoms”: Haunted Dress, Memory, and Agentic Materiality in Colm Tóibín’s The Master.- 7. The Thing About Haunted Houses: In The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and The Haunting of Hill House.- 8. There’s Something in the Tea: Murder and Materiality in Dark Angel.- 9. Criminal Things: Sherlock Holmes’ Details of Detection and Their Neo-Victorian Revisions.- 10. The Sleight of Hand: Appearance and Disappearance of Things in Neo-Victorian Magic.

Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres have coedited and contributed chapters to the following: Neo-Disneyism: Inclusivity in the Twenty-First Century of Disney’s Magic Kingdom (Oxford, 2022), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2022), The Theological Dickens (Routledge, 2022), Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media(Palgrave, 2020); Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (Anthem, 2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 2019); and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (Anthem 2019). The two cowrote A Vindication of the Redhead: The Typology of Red Hair Throughout the Literary and Visual Arts (Palgrave, 2021).

Danielle Mariann Dove is a TeachingFellow in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Surrey. Her research and publications centre on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, with a specific focus on dress and fashion history, material culture, and literary celebrity. Her monograph on dress in neo-Victorian fiction is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.