Contemporary British fiction (and graphic novels, and drama, and scholarship...and, what the hell, films) on late Victorian (1870-1900) subjects

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I'm currently working as a research assistant for a prof who is writing something on the decadent figures of the late Victorian (1870-1900) period, and is looking for material from 1980 onwards that addresses this. So, novels like A.S. Byatt's Possession or Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, graphic novels like From Hell or V For Vendetta (simply having a Victorian aesthetic counts) and especially things like Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly or Thomas Kilroy's play The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, which take fictional or real-life figures from the era and put a fresh spin on them are not only acceptable, but preferred.

If anyone has anything that they can recommend, I would be extremely grateful. Don't worry about the theme of "decadence" too much--if I just have titles, I can sort through what does and does not fit.

Oh yeah, films and TV/miniseries are fair game too.

rhymes with "blondie blast" (cryptosicko), Friday, 26 August 2016 02:32 (seven years ago) link

Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, perhaps?

one way street, Friday, 26 August 2016 02:42 (seven years ago) link

Check out Alan Hollinghurst's uneven and not entirely successful The Stranger's Child set in Georgian England and quite gay.

The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 26 August 2016 02:43 (seven years ago) link

i always thought someone should write a great gay victorian-era nautical series a la the aubrey and maturin books. only gayer. some highbrow friggin' in the riggin'. untapped market, imho. or maybe there is one and i just don't know about it. those boats must have been pretty steamy!

scott seward, Friday, 26 August 2016 03:09 (seven years ago) link

It's not a series, but there's always Billy Budd.

one way street, Friday, 26 August 2016 03:22 (seven years ago) link

crimson petal and the white

just sayin, Friday, 26 August 2016 03:32 (seven years ago) link

DJ Taylor's 'Kept'

I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Friday, 26 August 2016 03:38 (seven years ago) link

in the (new stories about) Old Mars, pre-Mariner Mars, that is, there dwells a interplanetary sailpunk extravaganza, "A Man Without Honor", which came to mind when reading Scott's call to arms and other parts---might be some friggin' in the riggin', but so much going on, it's a little hard to tell.
Also there's Kim Newman's Anno Dracula---stealing a couple things from Amazon:

As Nina Auerbach writes in the New York Times, " Stephen King assumes we hate vampires; Anne Rice makes it safe to love them, because they hate themselves. Kim Newman suspects that most of us live with them . . . . Anno Dracula is the definitive account of that post-modern species, the self-obsessed undead." But wait there's more:
(originally from Publisher's Weekly)What if Count Dracula married Queen Victoria? On this intriguing, but inescapably silly, conceit, Newman ( Jago ) bases his exercise in historical horror fiction, previously published in the U.K. In England, circa 1888, "turning" vampire is all the rage: such luminaries as Oscar Wilde, Inspector Lestrade, Sherlock Holmes's collaborator, and the Queen herself have embraced vampirism. Those who haven't find themselves shunned by society and facing banishment to internment camps if their opposition to the new regime becomes threatening. Enter Jack the Ripper. In this version of history, he is none other than Jack Seward, the lovelorn doctor of Bram Stoker's Dracula , who here murders vampire women to avenge the death of his beloved Lucy. While Londoners, vampire and "warm" alike, vie to catch the Ripper for their own agendas, Charles Beauregard, agent of Conan Doyle's mysterious Diogenes Club, must track him down for the most vital reason of all: the future of England. Newman's meticulous attention to historical detail occasionally seems superfluous in a work of such unabashed fantasy, but his prose is sure-handed and vivid, especially in Seward's diary entries, which, free of the welter of Victorian trivia, are truly engrossing.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc

Now it's a series; the first book was fine, also enough.

dow, Saturday, 27 August 2016 02:39 (seven years ago) link

"turning" vampire is all the rage: prob an influence on True Blood when it was good.

dow, Saturday, 27 August 2016 02:41 (seven years ago) link

Also lifting the straight non-v as terrorist in world of vampires from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, but adding Victoriana and Victoria.

dow, Saturday, 27 August 2016 02:45 (seven years ago) link


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