Neo-Victorian Cannibalism

A new scholar book with Brontë-related content:

Neo-Victorian Cannibalism
A Theory of Contemporary Adaptations
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Palgrave Pilot
ISBN: 978-3-030-02558-8

This Pivot examines a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, including cannibalism. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction, demonstrating how cannibalism provides a framework for understanding the genre’s origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in its fiction.

Chapter 2 is: Contesting (Post-)colonialism: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Three Neo-Victorian Rejoinders

This chapter looks at three generations of texts, beginning with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It establishes the important connection between two literary responses to Victorian literature, namely the wider neo-Victorian genre and a more specific subset of it, which reconsiders the nineteenth century from a postcolonial perspective. These two are yoked together in Jane Eyre’s literary daughter, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is considered by many critics to be the foundational neo-Victorian text. I then read three Anglo-American neo-Victorian novels which return to both Brontë’s and Rhys’s models. In particular, I focus on how these later works reorient the narrative focus away from the empowered Creole Antoinette (Bertha Mason) in Wide Sargasso Sea back to the British characters of Jane Eyre.