This volume highlights humour's crucial role in shaping historical
re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging
from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody
to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian
humour's politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical
implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film,
webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed
distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century
referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly
self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how
neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective
socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also
risks recycling the past's invidious ideologies under the
politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of
negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection
invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of
humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at
times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event
provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by
neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers
- including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic,
the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful - producing a
richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of 'canonical'
neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic
outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the
neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at - the Victorians, as we
like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge?
This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of
texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant
critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to
those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as
well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof.
Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia
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