The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism

Title: The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism
Published by: Palgrave Macmillan
Release Date: 2024

This handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors’ life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives—from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness—in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.

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About the author (2025)

Brenda Ayres, now retired from full-time residential teaching, currently teaches online in the graduate program for English Literature for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has edited and authored chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism (2024), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2023), Neo-Victorian Things (2022), Neo-Disneyism: Inclusivity in the Twenty-First Century of Disney's Magic Kingdom (2022), The Theological Dickens (Routledge, 2022), Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media (2020); Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 2019); and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty- first Century (2019). Most recently she has written and published Wollstonecraft and Religion (2024), and Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works (Routledge, 2024).