The Wilkie Collins Journal
Special issue: Neo-Victorian Collins
Guest editors: Jessica Cox (Brunel University) and Claire O’Callaghan (Loughborough University)
The fiction of Wilkie Collins features heavily in contemporary neo-Victorian cultural interventions. Recent stage and screen adaptations include the BBC’s TheMoonstone(2016) and TheWoman in White(2018), and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s West End musical version of TheWoman in White(2004-2006; 2017-18). His influence is similarly ubiquitous in neo-Victorian writing, from James Wilson’s bio-fiction, The Dark Clue(2001) to Sarah Waters’s Booker-nominated Fingersmith(2002), to YA novels including Linda Newbery’s Set in Stone(2006) and Jane Eagland’s Wildthorn(2009). These recent adaptations and reworkings of his fiction continue a tradition begun by Collins himself, who adapted several of his novels for the Victorian stage. This tradition continued throughout the twentieth century, encompassing silent films and early radio adaptations, Golden Age mystery novels, and numerous television adaptations. Yet to date, in contrast to that of his friend and collaborator, Charles Dickens, neo-Victorian studies has paid relatively little attention to Collins’s cultural legacy.
This special issue of The Wilkie Collins Journalwill contribute to the small but extant body of work devoted to the way in which his works have been revisioned, reappraised and transformed beyond the nineteenth century. It aims to locate his cultural legacy across diverse media. Accordingly, papers are invited that examine the diversity of Collins’s neo-Victorian afterlives. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Collins and adaptation/rewritings in literature, film, TV
- Reworkings of specific texts
- Collins and the neo-Sensation novel
- Collins as a character/figure in neo-Victorianism and contemporary biofiction
- Influence and intertexts
- Collins and contemporary genre
- Intersections between Collins, Dickens and the neo-Victorian
Please send a 500-word proposal for articles between 5-8000 words to the guest editors, Claire O’Callaghan and Jessica Cox by 20 December 2018, including a short biographical note. Notifications on the outcome of proposed articles will be sent by early January 2019. Completed articles will be due by April 2019 and should be sent as a Word.doc attachment via email to C.OCallaghan@lboro.ac.ukand jessica.cox@brunel.ac.uk.
Please consult The Wilkie Collins Journal website for submission guidance (https://wilkiecollinssociety.org/journal/submissions/).
Queries about potential papers or any aspect of the special issue can be sent to the guest editors at the email addresses listed above.