Victorian Afterlife Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff, Editors		$22.50 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3324-X ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3324-1
A foundational look at contemporary uses of the Victorian and the presence of the past in postmodern culture. Celebrated films by Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, and Ang Lee; best-selling novels by A. S. Byatt and William Gibson; revivals of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll's Alice, and nostalgic photography; computer graphics and cyberpunk performances: contemporary culture, high and low, has fallen in love with the nineteenth century. Major critical thinkers have also found in the period the origins of contemporary consumerism, sexual science, gay culture, and feminism. And postmodern theory, which once drove a wedge between contemporary interpretation and its historical objects, has lately displayed a new self-consciousness about its own appropriations of the past. This diverse collection of essays begins a long-overdue discussion of how postmodernism understands the Victorian as its historical predecessor. "Victorian Afterlife's project is more than timely-to explore late postmodernism's obsession with the Victorians. Fifteen essays consider this fixation on the nineteenth-century past in literary and popular culture. The essays cross multiple histories: photography, film, the pastiche Victorian novel, techniques of exhibition and display, the discourse of the computer, Queen Victoria and modern feminism, colonial history, and the sexualities of versions of Alice in Wonderland. This richness will make the book a central text for inquiries into the Victorian." —Times Literary Supplement “Unexpected and fresh; a good balance is struck between unexplored subjects and the anticipated but necessary topic. This volume fills a previously empty space in Victorianist commentary.” —South Central Review Contributors: Nancy Armstrong, Ian Baucom, Jay Clayton, Mary A. Favret, Simon Gikandi, Jennifer Green-Lewis, Kali Israel, Laurie Langbauer, Susan Lurie, John McGowan, Judith Roof, Hilary M. Schor, Ronald R. Thomas, and Shelton Waldrep. John Kucich is professor of English at the University of Michigan. Dianne F. Sadoff is chair and professor of English at Miami University. 304 pages | 12 black-and-white photos | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2000

 

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