Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality-including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects-and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.
"Neo-Victorian Things successfully situates itself at the intersection of neo-Victorian studies and material culture studies, meticulously examining previously unexplored or overlooked objects. ... Each chapter revolves around aclearly identified focus ... . It is highly recommended for scholars in the field, or anyone simply with an interest in the Victorian past and its relevance today." (Hatunnur Ciftci, KULT_online - Review Journal for the Study of Culture, Issue 69, May, 2024)