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

Abstract

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