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'Women and Humour in the Long Nineteenth Century' British Association for Victorian Studies Conference 23rd - 26th June 2021 Online Event Can women be funny? After a 2017 conference on [...]

In the exoticising Victorian British imagination, Japan was constructed as beautifully atemporal, at once modern and medieval, sophisticated and infantile, unintelligible and universal, outlandish and safely familiar, both asserting and challenging Western supremacy - not unlike the neo-Victorian gaze on the Victorian era. Responding to Antonija Primorac and Monika Pietrzak-Franger's call for global neo-Victorian studies, which considers the nineteenth century across temporal as well as global and transnational axes, this article examines how two British authors attempt to challenge and re-imagine Meiji Japan (1868-1912), by considering Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (2015) and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (2020) and Lian Hearn's The Storyteller and His Three Daughters (2013). In confronting a Victorian Orientalist imaginary which instrumentalised aesthetics of quaintness, cuteness, and eccentricity, these works discuss Britain's relationship with and problematic implication in Japan as a rising Other Empire from a neo-Victorian perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the online British Association for Victorian Studies Conference titled "Women and Humour in the Long Nineteenth Century" held from June 23 to 26, 2021. The keynote speech on feminist Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler was delivered by professor Margaret Stetz. Among the themes of the panel discussions and plenary lecture were women and the press, tradition and female slapstick. Also noted is a stand-up performance by Iszi Lawrence at the conference.

Steampunk, a retro-speculative aesthetic which re-imagines a hyper-Victorian never-was infused with technofantasy, often realises Victorian London as its creative epicentre: the city provides a nexus of accumulated urban imaginaries in which social, political, and technological paradigms converge or originate. In this article, I examine how steampunk may creatively re-route strategies of reassessing human-machine relationships, inherited from its sister-genre cyberpunk, through a retrofitted industrial paradigm in order to examine selfhood and Otherness, alienation and hybridisation, through the metaphor of city. Through recourse to an outmoded and defamiliarizing Victorian aesthetic, steampunk translates concerns about cyber-technology back into a physical, tangible sphere, where they are productively encoded through and within urban space. My reading focuses on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's seminal novel, The Difference Engine (1990) and S.M. Peters' post-millenial novel Whitechapel Gods (2008) and considers them in the context of urban Gothic and steampunk's maker culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late 1880s, London's East End had come to represent the antithesis to enlightened progressive Victorian identity. Literary and journalistic narratives centred on its Gothic qualities and painted it as a labyrinth of crime, misery, and degeneration which embodied middle class fears. Until recently, neo-Victorian depictions frequently reproduced this Gothic gaze, sometimes re-positioning the nineteenth century as the other to a post-colonial perspective. In this article, I examine how the BBC's/Amazon UK's Ripper Street (2012-2016) deconstructs these biased gazes and in doing so disentangles the East End from the Ripper myth. By re-painting Whitechapel with imaginative historical realism, the series explores underrepresented Victorian identities and challenges the notion of crime as a social pathology. I argue that, by presenting itself as the result of numerous complex imperial and social interconnections, Ripper Street offers new, productive, and valuable perspectives on a formative past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]