Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts

by Anna Maria Jones (Editor), Rebecca N. Mitchell (Editor)

Overview

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images-illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera-to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.

From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today's steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored.

In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works-Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko's Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others-alongside their antecedents, from Punch's 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present.

Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821422472
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2016
Series:	Series in Victorian Studies
Edition description:	1
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Anna Maria Jones is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Her recent articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, European Romantic Review, Criticism, Neo-Victorian Studies, and BRANCH.

Rebecca N. Mitchell is reader in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference, coeditor of the anniversary edition of George Meredith’s Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, and coauthor, with Joseph Bristow, of Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Reading the Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Palimpsest Anna Maria Jones Rebecca N. Mitchell 1

I Adaptations

1 The Explicated Image: Graphic "Texts" in Early Victorian Print Culture Brian Maidment 39

2 Adapting Alice in Wonderland: Cultural Legacies in Contemporary Graphic Novels Monika Pietrzak-Franger 67

II Graphic Epistemologies

3 Picturing the "Cosmic Egg": The Divine Economy of a Hollow Earth Peter W. Sinnema 93

4 Mixed Media Olivia Plender's A Stellar Key to the Summerland and the Afterlife of Spiritualist Visual Culture Christine Ferguson 121

III Refigured Ideologies

5 A New Order: Reading through Pasts in Will Eisner's Neo-Victorian Graphic Novel, Fagin the Jew Heidi Kaufman 151

6 The Undying Joke about the Dying Girl Charles Dickens to Roman Dirge Jessica Straley 176

IV Temporal Images

7 Prefiguring Future Pasts: Imagined Histories in Victorian Poetic-Graphic Texts, 1860-1910 Linda K. Hughes 207

8 Before and After: Punch, Steampunk, and Victorian Graphic Narrativity Rebecca N. Mitchell 237

V Picturing Readers

9 Reading Victorian Valentines: Working-Class Women, Courtship, and the Penny Post in Bow Bells Magazine Jennifer Phegley 269

10 Picturing "Girls Who Read": Victorian Governesses and Neo-Victorian Shojo Manga Anna Maria Jones 300

Afterword: Photography, Palimpsests, and the Neo-Victorian Kate Flint 331

Bibliography 341

Contributors 371

Index 375

Editorial Reviews

Drawing on the Victorians is a singularly diverse and multinational collection, a fine critical embodiment of the palimpsest trope that stands … at its conceptual core.“—Victorian Studies


“Jones and Mitchell’s innovative and pioneering collection will establish new areas of scholarlydebate. Moreover, its focus on ‘stories and poems, books and periodicals, comics, cartoons, andother ephemera’ will enrich discussions on the interplay between the production andreception of Victorian and neo-Victorian graphic texts and textual images.”—Neo-Victorian Studies


“Stunningly transnational … The editors take the notion of the palimpsest as their conceptual frame because it speaks to haunting of one text and/or image by another, a layering, they assert, that becomes particularly complex when linguistic, geographic, historical, and temporal boundaries are crossed.”—David L. Pike, American University


“Research in Victorian and neo-Victorian visual and verbal art receives a welcome boost from this collection. Not claiming to be a definitive map or theory, it nonetheless at every point opens up new questions for debate and new topics for investigation by future critics and scholars.” —David Skilton, Emeritus Professor in English, Cardiff University


“This pioneering work in illustration studies will provide a necessary starting point for future work in the field.”—Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, author of Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875

From the Publisher