Victorians and Videogames

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-80483-5
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 278 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 574 g

Reihe: Among the Victorians and Modernists

Victorians and Videogames will examine how games interact with nineteenth-century genres, aesthetics, and literary themes as a means of engaging, critiquing, or challenging their original contexts. In essence, this collection will consider the ways in which embodied, user-driven storytelling can impact new and challenging engagements with the nineteenth century in the contemporary world. This book contains four categories that summarize major trends in nineteenth-century-oriented games. The first section, “Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality,” examines games that directly adapt nineteenth-century texts, considering how ludic and literary elements work together to produce new commentary on the original texts. Second, “Genre and Character (re)Creation,” will examine games that are more thematically engaged with the nineteenth century. Third, “Navigation, Colonization, and Exploration” examines the ways in which players move and interact with game environments, and how game design itself can often evoke social systems, or the politics of imperialist conquest. Finally, “Science, Systems, and Technologies” will examine how contemporary games engage with nineteenth-century innovations (both good and bad) in science and technology. In this way, the sections begin with more explicit nineteenth-century engagements and build to more theoretical and subtextual ones.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Lin

Cameron, Brooke

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Victorians and Videogames: Literary and Thematic Representations of the Nineteenth Century in Virtual Play

PART 1: Ludic and Narrative Intertextuality

1 Powerful Innocence: George MacDonald’s Legacy in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Heather L.N. Hess

2 Silence by (Game) Design: Shapeshifting and Assimilation in "The Little Mermaid" and the Wolf Among Us

Lin Young

3 Futurity and the Death Drive in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)

Ian M. Clark And Jesse Gauthier

4 Race, Gender, and Reparative Revisions in Lauren Woolbright and Marie Jarrell’s Videogame Sequel Blood of the Vampire (2018)

Felipe Espinoza Garrido

PART 2: Genre and Character (re)Creation

5 "Her Beauty Was Blinding": Amnesia: Justine as Sensation Fiction

Zoe Antoinette Eddy

6 Do-It-Yourself Arcadia: The Pastoral, William Morris, and Stardew Valley

Shannon Payne

7 London Detective Mysteria: A Case Study on the Limitations and Potentials of the Otome Detective in Japanese Neo-Victorian Video Games

Mimi Okabe

8 Queering the Neo-Victorian Video Game: Intrigues at the Boarding School

Rachel M. Friars

PART 3: Navigation, Colonization, Exploration

9 80 Days, 80 Plays: Curious Failure as Antidote to Empire in Verne and inkle Studio’s 80 Days

Holly Wiegand

10 "A Hunger Draws the Desperate Here": The Virtual Return of Franklin’s Lost Expedition

Travis Hay

11 Autistic Masking in Wuthering Heights and Little Nightmares II

Brooke Cameron

12 "I Caught a Frog! or It’s a New Neighbor. and I Have Some Apologizing To Do": Victorian Species in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Kelsey G. Quinn

PART 4: Science, Systems, Technologies

13 Fragments of Time, Technological Ghosts, and Gothic Narratives in Horizon Zero Dawn

David A. Smith

14 Blood and Blackness in FromSoftware’s Bloodborne: Toward a Theory of Racial Recursivity

Austin Anderson

15 Dangerous Collection: The Decolonization of Victorian Botany in Strange Horticulture

Jennifer Minnen And Melissa Kagen

16 Lies of P: Victorian Posthuman and Metamorphic Bodies

Francesca Arnavas And Mattia Bellini

Über Autor(innen)

Lin Young is currently Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. Publications include articles in Women’s Writing, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, and book chapters in the Eisner-winning LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader (2022) and The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2024).

Brooke Cameron is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women’s Writing, 1880–1914 (2020) and co-editor of The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature 2022, with Lara Karpenko) and of the special issue on “Vampires: Consuming Monsters/Monstrous Consumption,” for Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural (2023, with Ian Clark and Suyin Olguin).