This article considers the effectiveness of transnational ties in the YWCA between the wars. The Association had established their network of women and “girls” long before World War One and were able to resume their connections after the war when…

Neo-Victorian scholarship frequently adopts mirror metaphors to elucidate how contemporary literature and culture revises the nineteenth century. Simon Joyce, for example, though he does not apply the term neo-Victorian, uses the idea of a driver glancing into a car rearview…

Although the term “biofiction” is regularly employed in neo-Victorian criticism it remains curiously under-theorised, without extended discussion of writers’ different approaches to the fictional re-imaginings of nineteenth-century historical subjects, or such representations’ varied ethical or ethically suspect implications. This paper…

This article provides a critical comparison between Cory Doctorow’s adapted short story “Clockwork Fagin” and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. It focuses particularly on Doctorow’s use of the posthuman “modded” child in order to question firstly whether the text performs a…

For the last several decades, there has been a pronounced influence of “retro” fashion and style on various youth subcultures. This occurrence has been in the form of larger, cultural trends in both the underground and mainstream, such as the…

A popular critical debate in recent years has concerned the significance of spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction. With reference to Freud, Derrida, and a range of neo-Victorian authors, this essay argues that the emphasis on the ways in which the past…

Curiosities are objects on sale in an antique dealer’s - bric à brac, knick-knacks, souvenirs, mementos. So The Old Curiosity Shop is about what we can think of as commodities, objects on display and for sale. A fine new book…

The Girl of the Period Miscellany is particularly interesting in that it reworked the Girl of the Period from an object of disdain into a figure who might be humorous, but who was also engaging and sympathetic. Rather than being…

Despite Graham Law’s assertion that The Woman in White (1861) “launched the fashion for ‘sensation fiction’” (97), that novel’s narrative mode has always more strongly suggested the detective genre rather than Sensation per se. Even one of its earliest critics,…

In this essay I want to examine how one Victorian family responded to the contradictory promise of domestic life. My test family is spectacularly unrepresentative, but in their extremity, they are – as I hope to demonstrate – instructive. They…