Neo-victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-witness to Nineteenth-century Suffering (Neo-victorian, 1)

Annotation This collection constitutes the first volume in Rodopi¿s Neo-Victorian Series, which explores the prevalent, but often problematic, re-vision of the long nineteenth century in contemporary culture. Here is presented for the first time an extended analysis of the conjunction of neo-Victorian fiction and trauma discourse, highlighting the significant interventions in collective memory staged by the belated aesthetic working-through of historical catastrophes, as well as their traces in the present. The neo-Victorian¿s privileging of marginalised voices and its contestation of masternarratives of historical progress construct a patchwork of competing but equally legitimate versions of the past, highlighting on-going crises of existential extremity, truth and meaning, nationhood and subjectivity. This volume will be of interest to both researchers and students of the growing field of neo-Victorian Studies, as well as scholars in trauma theory, ethics, and memory and heritage studies. Interrogating processes of cultural commemoration and forgetting and how to ethically represent the suffering of cultural and temporal others, the collection negotiates the temptations of appropriative empathy and voyeuristic spectacle, while all the time struggling with the central paradox: the ethical imperative to bear after-witness to history¿s silenced victims in the face of the potential unrepresentability of extreme suffering.¿The volume covers an important gap in the state of the art in neo-Victorian studies, as it offers in-depth analyses, from the perspective of trauma theory, of a significant number of neo-Victorian fictions published between the 1960s and the present¿running all the spectrum from the collective physical and psychological traumas associated with the armed conflicts and the spread of Empire, to individual and more covert family traumas, like incest, or ideological traumas related to the confrontation of religious belief and Darwinian science.¿ Susana Onega, University of Zaragoza, Spain This collection constitutes the first volume in Rodopi's Neo-Victorian Series, which explores the prevalent but often problematic re-vision of the long nineteenth century in contemporary culture. Here is presented for the first time an extended analysis of the conjunction of neo-Victorian fiction and trauma discourse, highlighting the significant interventions in collective memory staged by the belated aesthetic working-through of historical catastrophes, as well as their lingering traces in the present. The neo-Victorian's privileging of marginalised voices and its contestation of master-narratives of historical progress construct a patchwork of competing but equally legitimate versions of the past, highlighting on-going crises of existential extremity, truth and meaning, nationhood and subjectivity. This volume will be of interest to both researchers and students of the growing field of neo-Victorian studies, as well as scholars in memory studies, trauma theory, ethics, and heritage studies. It interrogates the ideological processes of commemoration and forgetting and queries how the suffering of cultural and temporal others should best be represented, so as to resist the temptations of exploitative appropriation and voyeuristic spectacle. Such precarious negotiations foreground a central paradox: the ethical imperative to bear after-witness to history's silenced victims in the face of the potential unrepresentability of extreme suffering.