Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation [Hardcover]

This book argues that deviance represents a central issue in neo-Victorian culture, and that the very concept of neo-Victorianism is based upon the idea of diverging from accepted notions regarding the nineteenth-century frame of mind. However, the study of the ways in which the Victorian age has been revised by contemporary authors does not only entail analogies with the present but proves  by introducing what is perhaps a more pertinent description of the nineteenth century  that it was much more deviant than it is usually depicted and perceived.

Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation explores a wide variety of textual forms, from novels to TV series, from movies and graphic novels to visual art. The scholarly and educational purpose of this study is to stimulate readers to approach neo-Victorianism as a complex cultural phenomenon.

1. Introduction: Dickens in Dismaland.- 2. Dirt Out of Place in Sweet Thames, The Great Stink and The Crimson Petal and The White.- 3. Julia Pastrana's Traces, or the Afterlives of the Victorian Ape Woman.- 4. Reanimating the Zombies of Nineteenth-Century London in Victorian Undead.- 5. Penny Dreadful from Neo-Victorian to Neo-Baroque.- 6. Picturing Deviance: Neo-Victorian Visual Art.- 7. Conclusion: Banksy at the Great Exhibition.

Saverio Tomaiuolo is Associate Professor of English at Cassino University, Italy. He has published In Lady Audleys Shadow. Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres (2010), Victorian Unfinished Novels. The Imperfect Page (2012) and a critical introduction to Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (2014). His entry on neo-Victorianism is included in the Blackwell EncycllÃ)