Deutsche Zeitschrift für Horrorstudien | German Journal of Horror Studies

We invite contributions on the Neo-Victorian Gothic for the third volume in the forthcoming Neo-Victorian Studies series, to be published by Rodopi in 2012. Since Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1969), which ‘revisioned’ Charlotte Brontë’s tropes of female persecution, imprisonment, and madness in Jane Eyre (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. This collection will explore the subversive potential, but also 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 postmodern “culture of death”, our obsession with terror and even with terrorism (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1993), back to the angst-ridden uncertainties occasioned by Victorian 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? To what extent is Beville correct in claiming that it gives birth to a new “literature of excess”, aimed not so much at historical representation, but rather the exploration of the limits of representation and the celebration of the unrepresentable as 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-Victorian Gothic interacts with alternative traditions of representation, such as realism and postcolonialism, as well as psychoanalytical, gender and queer theory.

•    Gothic spaces: prison tropes, asylums, and nightmare cityscapes
•    postcolonial Gothic and the monsters of imperialism
•    Steampunk and the Gothic
•    tropes of the Doppelgänger or double
•    Gothic adaptations (e.g. reworkings of nineteenth-century sensation novels)
•    ‘Gothicising’ 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 imperilled femininities and Gothic heroes
•    Gothic sexualities: re-thinking degeneration, perversion, and degradation
•    problematising narrative manipulation and reader expectation/response
•    neo-Victorian Gothic and the limits of representation

- to the series editors: Dr Marie-Luise Kohlke <m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk>
- and Prof Christian Gutleben <Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr>