Heterotopic and Neo-Victorian Affinities: Introducing the Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias

The introduction to this special issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias investigates the affinitiesbetween the spaces designated by Michel Foucault’s ambivalent and protean concept of ‘heterotopia’and the similarly equivocal, shifting, and adaptable cultural phenomenon of ‘neo-Victorianism’.In both cases, cultural spaces and/or artefacts prove deeply intertwined with chronicity, at oncejuxtaposing and blending different temporal moments, past and present. Socially produced sitesof distinct emplacement are exposed not just as culturally and historically contingent constructs,but simultaneously enable forms of resistance to the prevailing ideologies that call them into being.The fertile exercise of considering heterotopias and neo-Victorianism in conjunction opens up newexplorations of the Long Nineteenth Century and its impact on today’s cultural imaginary, memoryand identity politics, contestations of systemic historical iniquities, and engagements with forms ofdifference, non-normativity, and Otherness

Heterotopic Proliferation in E. S. Thomson’s Jem Flockhart Series

This article explores the convergence, inversion, and collapse of heterotopic spaces in E. S. Thomson’s neo-Victorian Jem Flockhart series about a cross-dressing female apothecary in mid-nineteenth-century London. The eponymous first-person narrator becomes embroiled in the detection of horrific murder cases, with the action traversing a wide range of Michel Foucault’s exemplary Other spaces, including hospitals, graveyards, brothels, prisons, asylums, and colonies, with the series substituting the garden for Foucault’s ship as the paradigmatic heterotopia. These myriad juxtaposed sites, which facilitate divergence from societal norms while seemingly sequestering forms of alterity and resistance, repeatedly merge into one another in Thomson’s novels, destabilising distinct kinds of heterotopias and heterotopic functions. Jem’s doubled queerness as a cross-dressing lesbian beloved by their Watsonean side-kick, the junior architect William Quartermain, complicates the protagonist’s role in helping readers negotiate the re-imagined Victorian metropolis and its unequal power structures. Simultaneously defending/reaffirming and contesting/subverting the status quo, Jem’s body itself becomes a microcosmic heterotopia, problematising the elision of agency in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the term. The proliferation of heterotopias in Thomson’s series suggests that neo-Victorian fiction reconfigures the nineteenth century into a vast network of confining, contested, and liberating Other spaces

Science in neo-Victorian poetry

This article considers the work of three contemporary poets and their engagement, in verse, with Victorian science. Beginning with the outlandish ‘theories’ of Mick Imlah’s ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ (1983), it moves on to two works of biografiction – Anthony Thwaite’s poem ‘At Marychurch’ (1980), which outlines Philip Henry Gosse’s doomed attempts to unite evolution and Christianity, and Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009). Starting off with John Glendening’s idea that science in neo-Victorian fiction, if fully embraced, provides an opportunity for self-revelation to characters, this article explores the rather less happy resolutions of each of these poems, while in addition discussing the ways in which these poems perform the formal changes and mutability discussed within them

Neo-Victorian Killing Humour: Laughing at Death in the Opium Wars

Via discussion of Peter Nichols' pantomime *Poppy*, George MacDonald Fraser's *Flashman and the Dragon*, and Amitav Ghosh's *Flood of Fire*, this chapter explores the ethical issues arising from the representation of historical trauma and bloodshed, specifically the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, through the comic mode

Neo-Victorian Slumming in London's Gothicity: The Victorian Metropolis' Televisual Transformation into "The City of Dreadful Night"

Through the prevalent neo-Victorian slumming trope, this chapter explores Victorian London's progressive Gothic transformation into a veritable "City of Dreadful Night", with special focus on the popular television series *Ripper Street* (2012-2016) and *Penny Dreadful* (2014-2016). This cultural re-imagining of the historical metropolis is linked to both the legacies of nineteenth-century Urban Gothic and philanthropic discourse, as well as audience predilections (then and now) for 'vicarious slumming' and literal slumming tourism