Neo-Victorian Things: Re-imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film [Hardcover]

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 materialityincluding opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objectsand 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 Lutzs The Bront? Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects.- 3. Around the Mizzenpole: Charles Johnsons 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 Campions The Piano and Daniel Masons The Piano Tuner.- 6. Wilful Phantoms: Haunted Dress, Memory, and Agentic Materiality in Colm T?ib?ns The Master.- 7. The Thing About Haunted Houses: In The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents andlc+