Neo-Victorian

Abstract

Despite neo-Victorianism's theoretical awareness of how colonial structures continue to infuse imaginations of the long nineteenth century, and how neo-Victorian culture might challenge both Victorian and contemporary ideological structures, common practices of neo-Victorian scholarship too often remain constricted in their geographical and conceptual breadth. In thinking about the structural convergences and challenges between Victorian studies and neo-Victorian studies, this keyword entry emphasizes texts and cultural traditions that have rarely been the purview of the neo-Victorian. Informed by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's analysis of race as a central function in Victorian studies, it charts alternative neo-Victorian genealogies in anglophone African and Black British literatures and cultures. On this basis, it asks how conceptions of the neo-Victorian will need to change if the field is to take seriously its anticolonial potential.