Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introducing Neo-Victorian Family Matters: Cultural Capital and Reproduction / Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- From London’s East End to West Baltimore: How the Victorian Slum Narrative Shapes The Wire / Matthew Kaiser -- Failing Families: Echoes of Nineteenth-Century Child Rescue Discourse in Contemporary Debates around Child Protection / Shurlee Swain -- The Figure of the Child in Neo-Victorian Queer Families / Louisa Yates -- Neo-Victorian Childhoods: Re-Imagining the Worst of Times / Marie-Luise Kohlke -- Deconstructing the Victorian Family? Trying to Reach Cloud Nine / María Isabel Seguro -- The Cratchits on Film: Neo-Victorian Visions of Domesticity / Regina Hansen -- The Rise and Fall of the Forsytes: From Neo-Victorian to Neo-Edwardian Marriage / Sarah Edwards -- The Lost Mother and the Enclosed Lady: Gender and Domesticity in MTV’s Adaptation of Wuthering Heights / Hila Shachar -- Monarchs and Patriarchs: Angela Carter’s Recreation of the Victorian Family in The Magic Toyshop / Sarah Gamble -- Family Traumas and Serial Killing in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem / Susana Onega -- Family Trauma and Reconfigured Families: Philip Pullman’s Neo-Victorian Detective Series / Anca Vlasopolos -- “That heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds”: Famine and Family in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea / Melissa Fegan -- (In)Visible Disability in Neo-Victorian Families / Rosario Arias -- More Than Kith and Less Than Kin: Queering the Family in Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Fictions / Georges Letissier -- Contributors -- Index.

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Tracing representations of re-imagined Victorian families in literature, film and television, and social discourse, this collection, the second volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, analyses the historical trajectory of persistent but increasingly contested cultural myths that coalesce around the heterosexual couple and nuclear family as the supposed ‘normative’ foundation of communities and nations, past and present. It sheds new light on the significance of families as a source of fluctuating cultural capital, deployed in diverse arenas from political debates, social policy and identity politics to equal rights activism, and analyses how residual as well as emergent ideologies of family are mediated and critiqued by contemporary arts and popular culture. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students of neo-Victorian studies, as well as scholars in contemporary literature and film studies, cultural studies and the history of the family. Situating the nineteenth-century family both as a site of debilitating trauma and the means of ethical resistance against multivalent forms of oppression, neo-Victorian texts display a fascinating proliferation of alternative family models, albeit overshadowed by the apparent recalcitrance of familial ideologies to the same historical changes neo-Victorianism reflects and seeks to promote within the cultural imaginary.