Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
English
Major Professor
Marty Gould, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Regina Hewitt, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Cynthia Patterson, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Amy Rust, Ph.D.
Keywords
Black Studies, Black Victoriana, Neo-Victorian, Racial abjection, Race
Abstract
A trend in neo-Victorian adaptations -- both novels and films-- that reimage, and at times reinterpret, canonical Victorian texts is the inclusion of nonwhite, mainly Black, perspectives, which has gained considerable traction in recent years. A vital aspect of this trend is the purposeful attempt to re-establish iconic Victorian characters through Black characterizations. In doing so, filmmakers and authors are reinvigorating familiar texts to provide an inclusionary space for the Black experience previously ignored in the original texts. These adaptations, which revisit and often reinterpret Victorian fiction, have undergone notable transformations by incorporating Black characters to fill voids in traditional literature originally rendered only from a white vantage point. Contemporary adaptations visualize the Black bodies that are noticeably absent from nineteenth-century fiction to recover a neglected Black experience. Modern revisionists use their respective adaptive media to bridge the historical to the modern, allowing the Victorian to speak to our moment. This project investigates the treatment of the Black body in neo-Victorian adaptations of long nineteenth-century fiction. Addressing a racial void in Victorian literature, modern writers and filmmakers utilize various strategies to create spaces for Black representation in various visual media. Neo-Victorian films and graphic novels are interventionist, updating “classic” Victorian texts to reflect a new cultural moment, correcting, and redirecting the Victorian cultural legacy. These adaptations have altered the source novel but have left its essence primarily intact to afford modern audiences an alternative method to consider social problems from a new vantage point. These adaptations dismantle and reassemble the original texts to remediate, repair, and reconstruct intersecting social theories of the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first centuries by presenting a Black point of view. With my research, I hope to call attention to this phenomenon and demonstrate that including Black voices in neo-Victorian adaptations serves as a compelling learning tool for fostering a more diverse cultural and literary landscape that relates to all members of the modern audience.
Scholar Commons Citation
McKinney, Urshela Wiggins, "Making the Invisible Visible: (Re)envisioning the Black Body in Contemporary Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (2024). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10220
