Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering

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.