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The B ook Beautiful: Aestheticism, Materiality, and Queer Books

The creator of the TV series Penny Dreadful John Logan has stated that he drew inspiration for the first three seasons (2014–16) from English Romantic poetry. Characters in the series read and recite Blake, Clare, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; comment on the nature of poetry; and make emotional connections through poetic affinities. Simultaneously, the structure of the series is gradually revealed to the audience as a pattern of doublings and couplings, of mirrors and parallels—all of which can be associated with the poetic device of rhyme. Rhyming shapes the sensory and cognitive experiences of the audience of the series; it also reflects the order of the diegetic universe, be it a freakish correspondence of incongruous things or God’s plan. Since these aesthetic choices seem to be part of the creator’s highly self-conscious design, the series becomes an adaptation of Romantic poetry, not only directly using the historical Romantic texts, but re-enacting in its organization the epistemological practice that rhyme is for English poetry.

Romantic Poetry and the TV Series Form: The Rhyme of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful

From Jason Mittel´s (2006) concept of narrative complexity in contemporary American television, who declares self-reflexivity as one of the complex elements in television narrative in the centuries XX and XXI, this article aims to point out a discussion on the metafictional and self-conscious features in the anglo-american television series Penny dreadful. For that, we chose to investigate mechanisms of performance and simulation that act through two ficctional spaces in that TV series, the Theatre and the Wax Museum, and other elements which materialize the self-reflexive discourse of that television program along by two seasons. Studies by Jost (2007), (2013), Eco (1989), Schechner (2013), Lee e King (2016), among others, were used as a theoretical and critical framework for this article.

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Do teatro ao museu de horrores: estratégias de autorreflexividade no seriado de televisão Penny Dreadful

The analytical framework of the fourth chapter consists in an association between Baroque (and neo-Baroque) and neo-Victorianism. Like Baroque poetics, neo-Victorian culture is focused on the notion of ‘transgression’, ‘excess’ and ‘deviance’ from norms and limits. This is particularly important in a recent TV series that centres upon various declinations of ‘sexual deviance’: Penny Dreadful (2014–2016). This series offers lavishly visual proofs of the value of ‘excess’ and of ‘non linear’ representation in neo-Victorian poetics. Penny Dreadful may be ascribed to the genre of neo-Victorianism because it basically rewrites Victorian canonical texts such as Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and cheap sensational fiction; at the same time, this TV show addresses cogent contemporary questions, reflecting on the issues of transgression and normalcy in our culture and society.

Penny Dreadful from Neo-Victorian to Neo-Baroque

Focusing on Alice in Wonderland (dir. Tim Burton 2010) and its less successful sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass (dir. James Bobin 2016), John Logan’s TV show Penny Dreadful (2014, 2015, 2016) and the TV film adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Affinity written by Andrew Davies and directed by Tim Fywell (2008), this chapter argues that what they have in common, besides their Gothic-visual style, is the way in which they employ tailoring and shape-shifting, transformation and re-fashioning as visual cues for adaptive interventions into Victorian gender dynamics and family structures. The chapter concludes that, even though these TV series and films perform a rejection of traditional, heteronormative family roles and structures through their stagings of gender-role reversal or constructed/queer families of choice, their production context limits the extent to which they manage to ultimately queer their characters and narratives.

Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations: Tailoring and Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation and Appropriation

« Le texte, le mythe, le meme : Penny Dreadful et l’adaptation » etudie la contamination comme categorie d’adaptation dans la serie televisee Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky). Selon David Greetham, le processus de « contamination » intervient « lorsqu’un mode de discours […] en infecte un autre de sorte que nous sommes confrontes aux deux en meme temps ». Alison Lee et Frederick King emettent l’hypothese que la contamination est une des variantes de l’adaptation. La serie affirme sans detours son statut d’adaptation, et utilise les concepts de parente et de theâtralite afin d’attirer l’attention sur la relation d’adaptation au texte d’origine. En opposition aux modeles lineaires et genetiques de l’adaptation, Penny Dreadful transforme le Frankenstein de Mary Shelley (1818, 1831), Le Portrait de Dorian Gray d’Oscar Wilde (1890, 1891) ainsi que le Dracula de Bram Stoker (1897) en des vecteurs de transmission culturelle: les memes (cf. Richard Dawkins) qui sont ici redefinis comme la relation que le recepteur entretient avec la litterature et la culture victoriennes en tant que mythe de la modernite.

From Text, to Myth, to Meme: Penny Dreadful and Adaptation

In her preceding article, Kelly Baker argues that “individual and collective senses of belonging are shaped by and hinged upon both the material and symbolic manifestations of place” (23). Baker rejects the primarily urban conception of the queer individual as spatially placeless, insisting that queer identity, both individual and communal, is rooted in material place. I agree with Baker’s material conception of queerness, however, I want to trouble her universal impression of queer identity being “rooted in material place” (21) by looking at the cultural limits of queer belonging within a cultural place outside of Western social conventions. R. Raj Rao’s e Boyfriend (2003) explores the problematic use of homosexuality as an essential identity for men who experience same-sex desire in 1992 Bombay, several years before the city is renamed Mumbai. Homosexual identity is difficult to locate in Bombay at this time because of the adaptable constructions of queer spaces necessary response to the government’s use of Section 377 to persecute people who engage in same-sex relations. Suparna Bhaskaran explains the history of this antisodomy statute, introduced by Lord Macaulay on October 6, 1860 making illegal voluntary participation in “a carnal knowledge committed against the order of nature by a person with a man, or in the same unnatural manner with a woman, or by a man or woman in any manner with an animal” (qtd. in Bhaskaran 15). e definition of sodomy, remains vague and arbitrary to this date, hence its malleability to political interference (22). Freelance journalist Yudi Pandava and impoverished slum resident Milind Mahadik each negotiate a space for themselves within Bombay where they can have sex with other men. Yudi associates this sex act with being homosexual (or gay), constructing an identity that crosses boundaries of caste and seeks queer spaces in a community defined by its common rejection of heteronormative constructs of sexuality. is means that queer spaces for Yudi are available to a variety of same-sex identities including drag queens, MSMs, hijras, and koti. However, Milind defines himself primarily by his caste as a Bhangi (74) and his traditional religion as a follower of Gautama Buddha (74), viewing his sexual desire for men as secondary to the heteronormative spaces in which his identity is defined by his family, religion, and caste. Milind finds himself in conflict with this heteronormative self-construction as he begins to explore same-sex desire. He conflates sexual roles with perceptions of masculinity, thereby limiting his experiences to those in which he can perceive himself as manly. What is revealed by Yudi’s and Milind’s differences in self-identification is that social perceptions of the self such as gay, straight, active, passive, man, and woman are constructed signifiers without an essentialist signified to represent. Without a common or essential truth to define same-sex desire, place, as

https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/wordhoard/article/download/7129/5827

Queer Spaces and Strategic Social Constructions in Rao’s The Boyfriend

Abstract:John Lanchester's darkly funny The Debt to Pleasure (1996) mixes genres such as the cookbook, the travelogue, and the detective story. Its Decadent narrator, Tarquin Winot, is a gourmet, an aesthete, and a murderer. As narrator, Tarquin is keen to provide the reader a glittering surface but to deny access to his story's hidden meanings. A critical approach to the novel through theories of artifice drawn from nineteenth-century Decadence challenges recent theories of surface reading, and argues that the text's surface, its literary style, is not transparent, but an aesthetic means that makes more visible the artifice of fiction.

Frederick D. King

Papers

From Text, to Myth, to Meme: Penny Dreadful and Adaptation

Queer Spaces and Strategic Social Constructions in Rao’s The Boyfriend

Consuming Surfaces: Decadent Aesthetics in The Debt to Pleasure

Bibliographic Metafiction: Dancing in the Margins with Alasdair Gray