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.

Autorentext

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is Associate Professor of English, Hong Kong Baptist University. She is the founding co-editor of the Hong Kong-based international publication, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and an editor of Hong Kong Studies, the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to Hong Kong.

Inhalt
Chapter One Introduction: Neo-Victorian Cannibalism ****

Chapter Two

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

I. Writing back: Victorian colonialism, neo-Victorian postcolonialism

II. Jane Eyre: The colonial, cannibal and Caribbean connection

III. Cannibalising text: Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea

IV. Cannibalising Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: Three neo-Victorian rejoinders

V. Conclusion: Literary ouroboros

Chapter Three

Dickens the Cannibal Cannibalised

I. Neo-Victorian biofiction

II. The neo-Victorian appeal of Dickens