Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives examines the neo-Victorian themes and motifs currently appearing in young adult fiction-specifically addressing the themes of authorship, sexuality, and criminality in the context of the Victorian age in British and American cultures. This book explicates the complicated relationship between the Victorian past and the turn to Victorian modes of thought on literature, history, and morality. Additionally, Sarah E. Maier aims to determine if the appeal of neo-Victorian young adult fiction rests in or resists nostalgia, parody, and revision. Given the overwhelming prevalence of the Victorian in the young adult genres of biofiction, juvenile writings, gothic, sensation, mystery, and crime fiction, there is much to investigate in terms of the friction between the past and the present.
Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick. Her recent publications include work on Ann Lister, the Brontës, neo-Victorian vampires, neo-Victorian Alienists, Maleficent, neo-Gothicism, and Queer Mash-ups. Maier has written A Vindication of the Redhead (2021 Palgrave) with Brenda Ayres, and they have co-edited The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism (2023 Palgrave), Neo-Victorian Things (2022 Palgrave), Neo-Disneyism (2022 Lang), The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture (2022 Routledge), The Theological Dickens (2022 Routledge), Neo-Victorian Madness (2020 Palgrave), Neo-Gothic Narratives: (2020 Anthem), Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019 Routledge), and Reinventing Marie Corelli (2019 Anthem).
