Neo-Victorian families : gender, sexual and cultural politics / / edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben.

• Superior document: Neo-Victorian series ; v. 2
• TeilnehmendeR: Kohlke, Marie-Luise.; Gutleben, Christian.
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Neo-Victorian series ; v. 2.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (407 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Tracing representations of re-imagined Victorian families in literature, film and television, and social discourse, this collection, the second volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, analyses the historical trajectory of persistent but increasingly contested cultural myths that coalesce around the heterosexual couple and nuclear family as the supposed ‘normative’ foundation of communities and nations, past and present. It sheds new light on the significance of families as a source of fluctuating cultural capital, deployed in diverse arenas from political debates, social policy and identity politics to equal rights activism, and analyses how residual as well as emergent ideologies of family are mediated and critiqued by contemporary arts and popular culture. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students of neo-Victorian studies, as well as scholars in contemporary literature and film studies, cultural studies and the history of the family. Situating the nineteenth-century family both as a site of debilitating trauma and the means of ethical resistance against multivalent forms of oppression, neo-Victorian texts display a fascinating proliferation of alternative family models, albeit overshadowed by the apparent recalcitrance of familial ideologies to the same historical changes neo-Victorianism reflects and seeks to promote within the cultural imaginary.

Table of Contents

pt. 1. Endangered childhoods and lost futures : filthiness and philanthropy -- pt. 2. Performing (im)possible happy families : deconstruction and reconstruction -- pt. 3. The mirror of society : familial trauma, dissolution and transformation.