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Ken Russell's film Gothic (1986) dramatises one of the key foundational myths of nineteenth-century British literature: the night at the Villa Diodati when Mary Shelley allegedly had the initial idea for her novel Frankenstein (1818). While the film can be enjoyed as a costumed horror film, this article argues that it is in fact an intricate response to the heritage film genre and to heritage tourism within the cultural and political context of Britain in the 1980s. Russell's film subverts heritage film conventions and mobilises early film techniques and forms of entertainment from the late Victorian era to comment upon the recuperation of Victorian culture in the heritage industry of the 1980s. To make clear how the film achieves this, four key aspects are analysed: the parallels between the film's structure and a funhouse ride; the film's use of the tableau vivant; the film's engagement with nineteenth-century celebrity cults; and the film's representation of heritage tourism. Taken together, these elements introduce a complex reflexivity in the film that allows the attentive viewer to enjoy it on several levels at once, both as a heritage horror film and as a neo-Victorian critique of the cultural forces that seek to revive the Victorian in a contemporary context.

Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments. This book seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science

Twilights -- 1. Medievalism and modernity / Marcus Waithe -- 2. Mythology, empire, and narrative / Jarad Zimbler -- 3. Death drives : biology, decadence, and psychoanalysis / Stefano Evangelista -- 4. Celticism / Daniel G. Williams -- Making it New -- 5. Cultures of the avant-garde / Christos Hadjiyiannis -- 6. Emerging poetic forms / Hannah Sullivan -- 7. When was modernism? / Michael H. Whitworth -- 8. What was the 'new drama'? / Sos Eltis and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr -- 9. Who was the new woman? / Angelique Richardson -- 10. Utopian thought and the way to live now / Anne Fernihough -- Modes and Genres -- 11. Naturalism, realism, and impressionism / Adam Parkes -- 12. The rise of short fiction / Adrian Hunter -- 13. Moon voyaging, selenography and the scientific romance / Matthew Taunton -- 14. Super-niches? : detection, adventure, exploration and spy stories / David Glover -- Sites and Spaces of Knowledge -- 15. Scientific formations and transformations / Rachel Crossland -- 16. Spirit worlds / Tatiana Kontou -- 17. Cityscapes : urban hyperspaces and the failure of matter in the late-Victorian and Edwardian metropolitan fictions / Laurence Scott -- 18. Regionalisms / Penny Fielding -- 19. The view from empire : the turn-of-the-century globalizing world / Elleke Boehmer -- Minds and Bodies -- 20. Race and biology / William Greenslade -- 21. The will to forget : amnesia, the nation, and Ulysses / Vincent J. Cheng -- 22. The posthuman spirit of the neo-pagan movement / Dennis Denisoff -- 23. Theatre and the sciences of mind / Tiffany Watt-Smith -- 24. The theatre of hands : writing the First World War / Santanu Das -- 25. The cult of the child revisited : making fun of Fauntleroy / Marah Gubar -- 26. Intersexions : dandyism, cross-dressing, transgender / Jana Funke -- Political and Social Selves -- 27. Political formations : socialism, feminism, anarchism / Ruth Livesey -- 28. 'The end of laissez-faire' : literature, economics, and the idea of the welfare state / Benjamin Kohlmann -- 29. Representing work / Sos Eltis -- Authorship, aesthetics, and print cultures -- 30. Reading aestheticism, decadence, and cosmopolitanism / Michèle Mendelssohn -- 31. Parodies, spoofs, and satires / James Williams -- 32. Life-writing : biography, portraits and self-portraits, masked authorship and autobiografictions / Max Saunders -- 33. Journalism and periodical culture / Faith Binckes -- 34. The illustrated book / Kamilla Elliott -- Technologies -- 35. The coming of cinema / Laura Marcus -- 36. Literature and photography / Kate Flint -- 37. Electricity, telephony, and communications / Sam Halliday -- 38. The residue of modernity : technology, anachronism, and bric-a-brac in India / Alexander Bubb -- 39. Actors and puppets : from Henry Irving's Lyceum to Edward Gordon Craig's Arena Goldoni / Olga Taxidou

The Victorian period saw the proliferation of penny press plagiarisms—that is, transformations of middle-class narratives, typically for a lower-class audience. Authors of these often anonymous transformations performed labor by expanding existing narratives in ways that resonate with today's understanding of fan fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Penny press plagiarisms illustrate the methodological challenges of studying the historical reception of literary and popular culture events that might be characterized as fannish, as the constitutive elements that describe a fan must be traced backward in the absence of living communities and with ephemeral evidence of engagement with popular culture texts. Application of insights from media and periodical studies shows that the penny press contributes to the long history of fandom. The Victorian period's literary markets, social class politics, and copyright paradigms defamiliarize these concepts in the field of studies of fans and fandoms, revealing how a history of Victorian fandom is also a history of for-profit transmedia storytelling.