Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Domestic Elsewheres (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9783031851704)

Fiction classified as 'neo-Victorian' has steadily emerged as a crucial mode of British cultural production. It is no coincidence that this most recent Victorian renaissance is taking shape in a climate of widespread empire nostalgia, with imperial-colonial legacies being relegated to a distant 'elsewhere.' In its critical re-visitations of the nineteenth century, neo-Victorianism has the potential to intervene in this often selective memory of Britain's imperial past. Nevertheless, systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate. This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British 'centres' in opposition to remote imperial 'margins.' It examines why domesticity - broadly understood as ideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations of gender, sexuality, and class - can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism's larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.

Author: Marlena Tronicke
ISBN-10: 3031851706
ISBN-13: 9783031851704
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 04/03/2025
Pages: 319
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.83w x 0.75d