he editors would like to propose an edited volume that would explore the literal and metaphorical uses of light in the fictionalizations of the Victorian period in various media and genres.
The Victorian period saw the introduction of a multiplicity of overlapping technologies and cultural practices of lighting, which radically transformed labour and the medical sciences, reinvented the night and connected ideas of leisure and security, refashioned the domestic interior as well as the perception of public appearance, and greatly impacted architecture and urban planning, policing, warfare and, not least, philosophy and the arts.
Light was central to the construction of Victorian subjectivities, not only as the support for disciplinary power and colonial control exerted through vision and inspection, but within a broader and multiple field of contingent encounters, artistic techniques, and dramatic situations. From this perspective, the iconic figures of the Victorian eye—the guard in the panoptical tower and the flaneur, the detective and the man in the crowd, the artist and the monster, the crystal palace and the heart of darkness, the hall of mirrors and the slum—can be placed within a more material and situated aesthetic, cultural, and political history of light (see Barnaby, 2017).
Thinking about light in material terms rather than only as metaphor or as disembodied and disembodying vision, can be seen as part of a methodological shift toward new materialism and ecocriticism in the humanities. Like water in the blue humanities (see Mentz, 2024), the materiality of light challenges clear-cut spatial distributions and delimitations, as well as constructions of bodily boundaries and binary attributions of agency and passivity through the look. Light, as Mieke Bal suggested, "actively contributes to the modification and the transformation of [...] experience" (2007).
The Victorian era's "relentless drive toward spectacular radiance" (Otter, 2008) set some of the conditions of the transition to modernity and its glare and glitter are, in many ways, still with us. Especially given the ongoing popularity of neo-Victorian fictions, and in the context of a constant expansion of the boundaries of the Victorian and the neo-Victorian as academic categories, a focus on material light also becomes an occasion for tracing the afterglow of Victorian visualities as they still influence the present politics of visibility and aesthetics of perception.
This edited volume seeks to explore how neo-Victorian fictions (not only novels, but also films, videogames etc.) address the materiality of light, illumination, and visibility and how they re-deploy and re-interpret the Victorian politics of light in relation to the present.
Possible topics may include how Victorian and Neo-Victorian fictions stage and transpose:
- Light technologies in Victorian architecture and material culture
- Light, illumination, visibility, darkness and dusk in Victorian literature, painting, theatre, and popular entertainment
- Disciplinary practices of illumination in urbanism and the medical sciences, in the organisation of domestic and industrial labour, in colonial and correctional spaces
- Reflective and transparent surfaces, twilight, exposure, and concealment as part of the construction of Victorian subjectivities
- Metaphors and performances of light and darkness in the colonial imaginary and in the construction of abled, gendered, and racialised bodies
- Visibility and invisibility, in their material, relational, and ecological aspects, as part of Gothic fiction and of Victorian constructions of happiness, monstrosity, and madness
- Ligthscapes: the enchantment and disenchantment of the night, light shows, theories of colour and visions of electricity, photographic and optical techniques
We invite expressions of interest accompanied by abstracts of possible chapters (approx. 500 words) and the authors’ short biographical notes (up to 150 words). The deadline is 15 October 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 November 2026. After the selection stage, we are going to put together a book proposal and present it to top-tier publishers (Brill and Routledge are our first choices). Once the book proposal is accepted, the exact length of the chapters and the deadline for chapters will be decided in consultation with the publisher (but we are provisionally planning the deadline to be March or April 2027).
Please send the abstracts to both editors: Anna Gutowska (SWPS University, Warsaw) and Carlo Comanducci (Vistula University, Warsaw).
Created 7 September 2026 Last modified 18 August 2026