Narrating Empire and Domesticity in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Fiction classified as ‘neo-Victorian’ has steadily emerged as a crucial mode of British cultural production. It is no coincidence that this most recent Victorian renaissance is taking shape in a climate of widespread empire nostalgia, with imperial-colonial legacies being relegated to a distant ‘elsewhere.’ In its critical re-visitations of the nineteenth century, neo-Victorianism has the potential to intervene in this often selective memory of Britain’s imperial past. Nevertheless, systematic re-readings of empire have so far played a comparatively minor role in neo-Victorian scholarly debate.This monograph addresses this lacuna by examining how neo-Victorianism negotiates constructions of empire in conjunction with the domestic. Drawing on a range of neo-Victorian novels as well as their Victorian intertexts and bringing these into dialogue with postcolonial theory, it asks how neo-Victorian fiction engages with, perpetuates, or subverts Victorian imaginaries of urban British ‘centres’ in opposition to remote imperial ‘margins.’ It examines why domesticity – broadly understood as ideologically charged concepts of family, home, and belonging based on formations of gender, sexuality, and class – can never be constituted independently of empire. In addition, the book raises questions regarding neo-Victorianism’s larger potentiality of narrating empire, suggesting that it is precisely the disorienting moments that constitute a characteristically neo-Victorian mode of exploring the entanglements of empire and domesticity.

Marlena Tronicke is Senior Lecturer in British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Her main areas of research and teaching include (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, early modern and contemporary British drama, gender and queer studies, as well as adaptation. Her first monograph, Shakespeare’s Suicides: Dead Bodies That Matter, was published in 2018. She is co-editor of Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains (special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2020, with Caroline Koegler and Pavan Malreddy), Queering Neo-Victorianism Beyond Sarah Waters (special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 2020, with Caroline Koegler), and the edited collection Black Neo-Victoriana (2021, with Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Julian Wacker).