Marlena Tronicke

Fiction classified as ‘neo-Victorian’ has steadily emerged as a crucial mode of British cultural production. It is no coincidence that this most recent Victorian renaissance is taking shape in a climate of widespread empire nostalgia, with imperial-colonial legacies being relegated to a distant ‘elsewhere.’ In its critical re-visitations of the nineteenth century, neo-Victorianism has the potential to intervene in this often selective memory of Britain’s imperial past. Nevertheless, systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate. This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British ‘centres’ in opposition to remote imperial ‘margins.’ It examines why domesticity – broadly understood as ideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations of gender, sexuality, and class – can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism’s larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.

Domestic Elsewheres

Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Klaus Stierstorfer

Florian Klaeger

Special Focus: "Omission", edited by Patrick Gill Throughout literary history and in many cultures, we encounter an astute use of conspicuous absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind. The term ‘omission’ as used in the present study, then, demarcates a common artistic phenomenon: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, but which nonetheless frequently encapsulates the tenor of the work as a whole. Such omissions can be employed for their affective potential, when emotions represented or evoked by the text are deemed to be beyond words. They can be employed to raise epistemological questions, as when an omission marks the limits of what can be known. Ethical questions can also be approached by means of omissions, as when a character’s voice is omitted, for instance. Finally, omission always carries within it the potential to reflect on the media and genres on which it is brought to bear: as its efficacy depends on the recipient’s generic expectations, omission is frequently characterized by a high degree of meta-discursiveness. This volume investigates the various strategies with which the phenomenon of omission is employed across a range of textual forms and in different cultures to conclusively argue for its status as a highly effective and near-universal form of artistic signification.

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

Special Focus: Law and Literature This special focus issue of Symbolism takes a look at the theoretical equation of law and literature and its inherent symbolic dimension. The authors all approach the subject from the perspective of literary and book studies, foregrounding literature’s potential to act as supplementary to a very wide variety of laws spread over historical, geographical, cultural and spatial grounds. The theoretical ground laid here thus posits both literature and law in the narrow sense. The articles gathered in this special issue analyse Anglophone literatures from the Renaissance to the present day and cover the three major genres, narrative, drama and poetry. The contributions address questions of the law’s psychoanalytic subconscious, copyright and censorship, literary negotiations of colonial and post-colonial territorial laws, the European ‘refugee debate’ and migration narratives, fictional debates on climate change, contemporary feminist drama and classic 19th-century legal narratives. This volume includes two insightful analyses of poetic texts with a special focus on the fact that poetry has often been neglected within the field of law and literature research. Special Focus editor: Franziska Quabeck, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.

Symbolism 21

Dead Bodies That Matter

Shakespeare's Suicides

Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter is the first study in Shakespeare criticism to examine the entirety of Shakespeare’s dramatic suicides. It addresses all plays featuring suicides and near-suicides in chronological order from Titus Andronicus to Antony and Cleopatra, thus establishing that suicide becomes increasingly pronounced as a vital means of dramatic characterisation. In particular, the book approaches suicide as a gendered phenomenon. By taking into account parameters such as onstage versus offstage deaths, suicide speeches or the explicit denial of final words, as well as settings and weapons, the study scrutinises the ways in which Shakespeare appropriates the convention of suicide and subverts traditional notions of masculine versus feminine deaths. It shows to what extent a gendered approach towards suicide opens up a more nuanced understanding of the correlation between gender and Shakespeare’s genres and how, eventually, through their dramatisation of suicide the tragedies query normative gender discourse.

Shakespeare’s Suicides

Caroline Koegler

Pavan Kumar Malreddy

Drawing from a rich corpus of British cultural production and postcolonial theory, this book positions Brexit in the historical nexus of colonialism, colonial nostalgia, and the rise of narcissistic nationalism in contemporary Europe. This collection moves away from existing literary discourses framing Brexit as a 'novel' event that ushered in a new genre of British fiction. It challenges the hackneyed public discourses that depict the results of the 2016 Referendum as the catalyst of regional instability as well as sociopolitical emergency in Europe. This book traces and critiques populist myth-making in the current United Kingdom through engagement with a wide range of literary and cultural productions, and reminds readers of the proleptic potential of postcolonial theorists and authors – Paul Gilroy, Austin Clarke, Mohsin Hamid, Ali Smith, to name a few – in identifying the residual ideologies of imperialism in the lead up to and after the Brexit campaign. The articles featured here extend Brexit’s figurative geography towards India, Britain, Pakistan, Ireland, Palestine, Barbados, and Eastern Europe, amongst others. They engage with films, media representations, and public discourses alongside more traditional genres such as the novel and stage productions. With a diversified approach to scholarly fields such as postcolonial literary and cultural studies, the book offers new insights into Brexit’s diverse histories not only in academic discourses, but also in the socio-political public sphere at large. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Marlena Tronicke

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