Drawing on existing work on the theoretical notion of the trace in neo-Victorian fiction, this article foregrounds the material trace as an appropriate framework for examining neo-Victorian gloves. Considering the ways in which gloves take on a ghostly life and agency of their own in neo-Victorianism, this article seeks to interrogate the material and spectral traces that they leave behind in Sarah Waters's Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002). It aims to show the significance of sartorial matters in these contemporary re-imaginings of the Victorian period, and to examine neo-Victorian fiction's relationship with the traces and fingerprints of the past. Locating the glove as entrenched within cultural memory as an explicitly Victorian item, this article suggests that it acts as both a marker of Victorian situatedness and a palpable entity capable of transgressing the temporal, spatial, and sexual boundaries that exist between the past and present.
{"title":"Ghostly Gloves, Haunted Hands: The Material Trace in Sarah Waters's Affinity and Fingersmith","authors":"D. Dove","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0351","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on existing work on the theoretical notion of the trace in neo-Victorian fiction, this article foregrounds the material trace as an appropriate framework for examining neo-Victorian gloves. Considering the ways in which gloves take on a ghostly life and agency of their own in neo-Victorianism, this article seeks to interrogate the material and spectral traces that they leave behind in Sarah Waters's Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002). It aims to show the significance of sartorial matters in these contemporary re-imaginings of the Victorian period, and to examine neo-Victorian fiction's relationship with the traces and fingerprints of the past. Locating the glove as entrenched within cultural memory as an explicitly Victorian item, this article suggests that it acts as both a marker of Victorian situatedness and a palpable entity capable of transgressing the temporal, spatial, and sexual boundaries that exist between the past and present.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43419675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years","authors":"S. M. Leonard","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0356","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47810390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as a trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present? Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within a complex set of relationships, including the narrative in which the paintings are embedded and which can only tell, and not show, the painting's power; the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds it, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and the past, whose relationship to the present the artwork both manifests and constructs. This article explores the use of art in this novel to reflect on the availability of the past in the present, as well as on neo-Victorianism itself, with its power to critique and rework the past and also to fascinate in the present. Ultimately, the novel captures not the power of art to access past lives, but a disconcerting vision of ourselves, caught in the act of (obsessive) re-representation.
{"title":"Painted Traces: Art and Ekphrasis in Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves","authors":"K. Mitchell","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0353","url":null,"abstract":"Nineteenth-century writers like Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Oscar Wilde were fascinated with the power of art. In their novels, the portrait could reveal secrets and capture the essence, or truth, of its subject. But how might painting be understood as a trace not of character so much as history? What power does the artwork have to connect us to past lives and histories today, continuing their activity into the present? Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) explores these questions by depicting artwork as talismanic, providing (a fantasy of) access to a past that is at once irretrievably lost and, potentially, available to imaginative reconstruction. As vestigial remains, the novel suggests, paintings manifest a past that is at once absent and present. The artwork it depicts exists within a complex set of relationships, including the narrative in which the paintings are embedded and which can only tell, and not show, the painting's power; the artist who paints and the viewer who beholds it, for whom the line between enchantment and enthrallment is easily blurred; and the past, whose relationship to the present the artwork both manifests and constructs. This article explores the use of art in this novel to reflect on the availability of the past in the present, as well as on neo-Victorianism itself, with its power to critique and rework the past and also to fascinate in the present. Ultimately, the novel captures not the power of art to access past lives, but a disconcerting vision of ourselves, caught in the act of (obsessive) re-representation.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49019793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates the way in which The Handmaiden (2017), a South-Korean adaptation of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002), provides a way of considering neo-Victorian adaptation in the globalised context. Although set in Korea under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s, the film indirectly refers in the background to traces of Victorian Britain. Replacing Fingersmith's class conflict with the cultural conflict between Japan and Korea, The Handmaiden represents the intricate process of cultural colonisation. Korean society in the 1930s is depicted in the film as doubly indebted to Victorian British and Japanese culture, for Japan modernised the country through absorbing Western culture in the late nineteenth century. The influence of Victorian Britain, a looming presence in the background of The Handmaiden, reveals how Victorian culture resonates in a country distant from Britain in a different time period. The Handmaiden serves to globalise the definition of the term ‘(neo)Victorian’ by shedding light on the influence of Victorian Britain in the Korean society of the 1930s. The Handmaiden's unique way of bringing together Victorian Britain and the regional politics of 1930s Northeast Asia serves to widen the range of neo-Victorian imaginations.
{"title":"What Makes It Neo-Victorian?: The Handmaiden and the Double Internalisation of Cultural Colonisation","authors":"Akira Suwa","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0354","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the way in which The Handmaiden (2017), a South-Korean adaptation of Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002), provides a way of considering neo-Victorian adaptation in the globalised context. Although set in Korea under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s, the film indirectly refers in the background to traces of Victorian Britain. Replacing Fingersmith's class conflict with the cultural conflict between Japan and Korea, The Handmaiden represents the intricate process of cultural colonisation. Korean society in the 1930s is depicted in the film as doubly indebted to Victorian British and Japanese culture, for Japan modernised the country through absorbing Western culture in the late nineteenth century. The influence of Victorian Britain, a looming presence in the background of The Handmaiden, reveals how Victorian culture resonates in a country distant from Britain in a different time period. The Handmaiden serves to globalise the definition of the term ‘(neo)Victorian’ by shedding light on the influence of Victorian Britain in the Korean society of the 1930s. The Handmaiden's unique way of bringing together Victorian Britain and the regional politics of 1930s Northeast Asia serves to widen the range of neo-Victorian imaginations.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42171588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Heidi Liedke, The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901","authors":"Virginia Leclercq","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0358","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45101042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Material Traces in Neo-Victorianism","authors":"Rosario Arias, P. Pulham","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0350","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42025993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hugo Bowles, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind","authors":"Saverio Tomaiuolo","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0359","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43870774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Neo-Victorian novelists reimagine handwritten documents to feed contemporary nostalgia for the materiality of handwriting. Handwriting signifies the personal and the private in ways that seem threatened in a digital age. Writers like Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Carey map material pathways to the nineteenth century with fictional characters who strive to possess the written past. Archival fantasies are simulated by novelists depicting writing processes and subsequent discovery and rereading of the handwritten trace by later generations. Imagined scenes of reading and writing describe tactile traces of handwriting that stage possession of the Victorian body in fragmented and partially recoverable states. Resurrection of the desired Victorian body through a metonymical relationship of hand/handwriting evokes a sense of a partial past recovered and experienced. Part of the aestheticism of the past relies on the aura of documents worn to a trace to evidence time and decay. Discovering the handwritten trace in this way becomes a sensory experience for readers and descriptions of decayed materiality emphasise survival for imagined fragments. Contemporary writing thus reveals a dual purpose to aestheticise the material past whilst demonstrating a postmodern drive to refute closure and ultimately celebrate the indeterminate facets of the handwritten trace.
{"title":"Faded Ink: The Material Trace of Handwriting in Neo-Victorian Fiction","authors":"K. Brindle","doi":"10.3366/vic.2019.0352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0352","url":null,"abstract":"Neo-Victorian novelists reimagine handwritten documents to feed contemporary nostalgia for the materiality of handwriting. Handwriting signifies the personal and the private in ways that seem threatened in a digital age. Writers like Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Carey map material pathways to the nineteenth century with fictional characters who strive to possess the written past. Archival fantasies are simulated by novelists depicting writing processes and subsequent discovery and rereading of the handwritten trace by later generations. Imagined scenes of reading and writing describe tactile traces of handwriting that stage possession of the Victorian body in fragmented and partially recoverable states. Resurrection of the desired Victorian body through a metonymical relationship of hand/handwriting evokes a sense of a partial past recovered and experienced. Part of the aestheticism of the past relies on the aura of documents worn to a trace to evidence time and decay. Discovering the handwritten trace in this way becomes a sensory experience for readers and descriptions of decayed materiality emphasise survival for imagined fragments. Contemporary writing thus reveals a dual purpose to aestheticise the material past whilst demonstrating a postmodern drive to refute closure and ultimately celebrate the indeterminate facets of the handwritten trace.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45713798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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