Search Results (5)

Jack the Ripper fictions tend to be realist in mode, making frequent use of the Victorian press and archives to depict the 1888 murders. At the same time, they marginalise and exploit the victims, defining them as silent testimonies to the power of the elusive perpetrator. In contrast, Alan M. Clark’s Jack the Ripper Victims Series (2011–2018), consisting of five novels devoted to one canonical victim each, shifts the focus and depicts their lives. This article outlines the way the fictionalisations of the five women’s lives bring to the fore five other ‘crimes’ or transgressions: addiction, domestic violence, unemployment, sex work, and homelessness, but also the way these texts replace what is sensational and formulaic in Ripperature with something more than mundane and gritty in the lived experience of everyday people, such as moments of personal joy or professional accomplishments. Drawing on Kate Mitchell’s approach to history, cultural memory, and neo-Victorian fiction, it argues that pre-dating the publication of The Five (2019), Clark managed to realistically re-present (make present) and represent (create a portrayal of) the late-Victorian crime of dismissing the women who were murdered. Full article

Critics agree that Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch (2006), marks a turn in her fiction, away from the farcical tone of her first three neo-Victorian novels and towards an ever-more serious concern with the changes in class structures and gender roles brought about by the fact of war. The novel tells the parallel stories of three women and one man living in various areas of London in the 1940s. Though they have different social status, ideology, and sexual orientation, they share similarly traumatic experiences as, together with war trauma, they harbour individual feelings of loss and/or shame related to their deviance from patriarchal norms. The article seeks to demonstrate that the palimpsestic and backward structure of the novel performs formally the ‘belatedness of trauma’ (Caruth 1995, pp. 4–5), in an attempt to respond aesthetically and ethically to the ‘mnemonic void’ (Freud [1014] 1950) or ‘black hole’ (Pitman and Orr 1990; Bloom 2010; Van der Kolk and McFarlane [1998] 2004) left both in the characters’ traumatised psyches and in our cultural memory of the 1940s by the erased memories of the decade’s non-normative or dissident others. Full article

In this article, we investigate neo-Victorian YA fiction’s efforts to mirror twenty-first-century feminist ideals in nineteenth-century spaces through examining the role of heterotopia in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019). We first consider how the novels’ steampunk elements figure in Gleason’s feminist framing of neo-Victorian London, particularly in terms of common heterotopias—primarily the garden and the museum—that the protagonists briefly navigate over the course of the series. Second, we explore how the series’ three female protagonists each occupy spaces that function as pseudo—“heterotopias of crisis”—that is, while each of them claims space within which to subvert expectations of women, these spaces and the activities they support are themselves fundamentally insular and yield no socio-cultural critique. Finally, we consider how the spaces created and occupied by the books’ villain, known as the Ankh, serve as heterotopias. We find that the fact that the only truly heterotopic spaces in the novels belong to the villain, whose transgressive deviance the series frames as a bridge too far, illustrates how disappointingly limited neo-Victorian YA can be in its ability to offer subversive mirrors to twenty-first-century feminism. Full article

This article explores the convergence, inversion, and collapse of heterotopic spaces in E. S. Thomson’s neo-Victorian Jem Flockhart series about a cross-dressing female apothecary in mid-nineteenth-century London. The eponymous first-person narrator becomes embroiled in the detection of horrific murder cases, with the action traversing a wide range of Michel Foucault’s exemplary Other spaces, including hospitals, graveyards, brothels, prisons, asylums, and colonies, with the series substituting the garden for Foucault’s ship as the paradigmatic heterotopia. These myriad juxtaposed sites, which facilitate divergence from societal norms while seemingly sequestering forms of alterity and resistance, repeatedly merge into one another in Thomson’s novels, destabilising distinct kinds of heterotopias and heterotopic functions. Jem’s doubled queerness as a cross-dressing lesbian beloved by their Watsonean side-kick, the junior architect William Quartermain, complicates the protagonist’s role in helping readers negotiate the re-imagined Victorian metropolis and its unequal power structures. Simultaneously defending/reaffirming and contesting/subverting the status quo, Jem’s body itself becomes a microcosmic heterotopia, problematising the elision of agency in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the term. The proliferation of heterotopias in Thomson’s series suggests that neo-Victorian fiction reconfigures the nineteenth century into a vast network of confining, contested, and liberating Other spaces. Full article

Michel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis. Full article