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
Biography
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).
