"Preface" to "Neo-Victorian Deviance", special issue of Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, 40, 2015 (data di pubblicazione 2017)

Since its early expressions, neo-Victorianism has shown a marked tendency to explore many forms of transgression from Victorian norms. This tendency is manifest in a variety of products circulated within our cultural system. Most visible in the latest proliferation of literary works set in the nineteenth century, the inclination to deviate from what constituted normativity at that time also emerges in comic books, graphic novels, TV series, films and other products which engage in a complex dialectic relation with their Victorian legacy. As the articles collected in this volume demonstrate, deviance is indeed a pivotal concept around which neo-Victorianism hinges. Deviance is here conceived in its social, linguistic and generic aspects which, all together, contribute to marking the specificity of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century rethinking of the past. Written by scholars coming from different countries and featuring a vast array of scrutinized textual forms (from novels to photographs, from movies to graphic novels and pre-Raphaelite paintings), the contributions included in this special issue of RSV provide a wide range of reflections on the ways and modalities according to which the notion of deviance has been read by contemporary artists.