Neo-victorian cities : : reassessing urban politics and poetics / / edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke, Christian Gutleben; cover illustration, design by Marie-Luise Kohlke ; contributors, Isabelle Cases [and thirteen others].

• Superior document: Neo-Victorian Series, Volume 4
• TeilnehmendeR: Kohlke, Marie-Luise,; Gutleben, Christian,; Cases, Isabelle,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill Rodopi,, 2015.; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Neo-Victorian series ; Volume 4.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (376 pages).

This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the femininised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- Troping the Neo-Victorian City: Strategies of Reconsidering the Metropolis / Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- Making and Unmaking ‘Marvellous Melbourne’: The Colonial City as Palimpsest in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Non-Fiction / Kate Mitchell -- Neo-Victorian Cities and the Ramifications of Global Capitalism in Ayeesha Menon’s Mumbai Chuzzlewits / Nathalie Vanfasse -- Re-imagining the Victorian Flâneur in the 1960s: The London Nobook-body Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher and Norman Cohen / Isabelle Cases -- ‘Part Barrier, Part Entrance to a Parallel Dimension’: London and the Modernity of Urban Perception / Julian Wolfreys -- Vulnerable Visibilities: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous Victorian Metropolis / Jean-Michel Ganteau -- Mapping Gothic London: Urban Waste, Class Rage and Mixophobia in Dan Simmons’s Drood / Mariaconcetta Costantini -- Neo-Victorian Cities of the Dead: Contemporary Fictions of the Victorian Cemetery / Susan K. Martin -- Londons under London: Mapping Neo-Victorian Spaces of Horror / Paul Dobraszczyk -- A Strangely Mingled Monster: Gender and Spatial Transgression in the Hardcore Metropolis of Paul Thomas’s Jekyll and Hyde / Laura Helen Marks -- Steampunking New York City in Kate and Leopold / Margaret D. Stetz -- The Ship and the Gun: The Perversity of Neo-Victorian Belfast in Glenn Patterson’s The Mill for Grinding Old People Young / Barry Sheils -- Adaptive Re-Use: Producing Neo-Victorian Space in Hong Kong / Elizabeth Ho -- Contributors / Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- Index / Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben.