Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions

Copyright

Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

What’s So Funny about the Nineteenth Century?

Part 1: Humour and Metanarratives

1 Parody after Providence: Christianity, Secularism, and the Form of Neo-Victorian Fiction

2 Neo-Victorian Killing Humour: Laughing at Death in the Opium Wars

3 “Bleak Hilarity” in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty

4 Drainage in a Time of Cholera: History and Humour in Matthew Kneale’s Sweet Thames

Part 2: Humour and Gender

5 Looking at Victorian Fashion: Not a Laughing Matter

6 Neo-Victorian Feminist History and the Political Potential of Humour

7 Good Vibrations: Hysteria, Female Orgasm, and Medical Humour in Neo-Victorianism

8 “People keep giving me rings, but I think a small death ray might be more practical”: Women and Mad Science in Steampunk Comics

Part 3: Humour and Postmodernism

9 “Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!”: The Neo-Victorian Novel-as-Mashup and the Limits of Postmodern Irony

10 Camp Heritage: Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm as Neo-Victorian Spectacle

11 Laughing (at) Freaks: “Bending the tune to her will” in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities

12 The Dog Days of Empire: Black Humour and the Bestial in J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur

Index