Neo-Victorian Adaptations

Neo-Victorian studies has "arrived" and its progression to academic respectability has taken a similar path to adaptation studies. Wh1le screen adaptations of literature are as old as film technology and take momentum from the rage for theatrical adaptations, nco-Victorian studies reflect on the more contemporary phenomenon of the recent increase in novels which exploit the idea of the Victorian period, either by rewriting classic texts (such as Great Expectations (1861) or Jane Eyre (1847)), pastiching a Victorian narrative style, and/or a focus on topics that promise to expose the less seemly underside of Victorian culture. Given the newness of the area as academic study it has garnered an astonishing amount of interest and yet, in common with adaptations, the area inspires fascination and loathing in equal pans. Mark Llewellyn observes that neo-Victorian studies "has the potential to help us think through the ways in which we teach, research and publish on the Victorians themselves" (2008: 165), suggesting that its presence within and beyond Victorian studies has paradigm-shifting potential I begin this chapter with such comparisons in order to state the obvious and get it our of way: neo-Victorian literary texts are themselves adaptations; even when they do nor refer back to a single Urtext, they remain compatible with contemporary definitions of adaptation and appropriation.