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Veith, Natalie. "“Remarkable, the view here, isn't it?”: Totalising views and diverted gazes in the league of extraordinary gentlemen." Victorian Ideologies in Contemporary British Cultures. Eds. Christina Flotmann-Scholz and Anna Lienen. anglistik & englischunterricht. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. 91–112. Added by: joachim (12/08/2020, 16:52) Last edited by: joachim (12/08/2020, 16:56) |
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| Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: Veith2019 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: General Keywords: "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", Moore. Alan, O’Neill. Kevin, Space, United Kingdom Creators: Flotmann-Scholz, Lienen, Veith Publisher: Winter (Heidelberg) Collection: Victorian Ideologies in Contemporary British Cultures |
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It is common for neo-Victorian works to both adapt and subvert the genre conventions of Victorian literature. As this article shows, this can also extend to the respective visual constructions that are inherent to these genres. In the Victorian literary discourse, the gaze is generally conceptualised as a productive device, a tool of knowledge production and progress, such as, for example, the imperial gaze in adventure fiction and discovery narratives. The first volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's neo-Victorian adventure comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by contrast, contains a critical (re-)negotiation of Victorian scopic regimes and corresponding strategies of meaning making. In pursuing a strongly vision-based approach, this article retraces the visual trajectories of the characters' gazes and puts them in relation to the manner in which the perspective of the readers on the storyworld is constructed. It addresses questions of visual privilege and its availability to both readers and characters as well as its connotations. As will be shown, the pluricodality of the medium is frequently exploited to layer the events happening on the plot level with pictorially encoded critique. This leads not only to a transformation and re-semantisation of totalising perspectival constructions as they were common in Victorian literature but also sheds a critical light on the ongoing usage of similarly totalising visual devices in contemporary comic books in the form of splash pages.
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