Neo-Victorian Graphic Novels: Learning to Unmaster the Archive

Recent calls for “undisciplining” Victorian studies have urged scholars to reflect on how our own intellectual endeavours remain entangled with the nineteenth century’s legacies of colonialism, racism, and violence. This chapter argues that the ways neo-Victorian graphic fictions position readers in relation to Victorian worlds can help us recognise the masterful pleasures that are all too easy to overlook in our scholarly forays into the archives. Jones provides an overview of neo-Victorian graphic texts and of the body of scholarship on that genre, considering in particular Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000–21), Frank Beddor and Liz Cavalier’s Hatter M (2008–14), and Ninomiya Ai and Katagiri Ikumi’s Are You Alice? (2010–15). Reading these examples as representative of larger phenomena, the essay argues that, whereas some modes of neo-Victorianism produce a masterful pleasure modelled on imperial conquest—inviting the reader to plunder the literary, visual, and material artefacts of the Victorian past—others invite a much less self-assured engagement with that archive, eliciting an approach that Julietta Singh in Unthinking Mastery (2018) has called “vulnerable reading.” Fostering this practice of vulnerable reading can aid the ongoing project of undisciplining Victorian and neo-Victorian studies.