Title: Victorian afterlife
Description: Celebrated films by Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, and Ang Lee; best-selling novels by A.S.Byatt and William Gibson; revivals of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll's Alice, and nostalgic photography, computer graphics and cyberpunk performances: contemporary culture, high and low, has fallen in love with the nineteenth century. Major critical thinkers have found in the period the origins of contemporary consumerism, sexual science, gay culture, and feminism. And postmodern theory, which once drove a wedge between contemporary interpretation and its historical objects, has lately displayed a new self-consciousness about its own appropriations of the past. This diverse collection of essays begins a long-overdue discussion of how postmodernism understands the Victorian as its historical predecessor.
Subjects: Historiography, English literature, Literature and history, Theory, History and criticism, Civilization, English fiction, Film and video adaptations, History, Postmodernism, Film adaptations, English literature, history and criticism, 19th century, Great britain, civilization
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 20th century, 19th century, Victoria, 1837-1901