Neo-Victorian negotiations of hospitality: an introduction

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue Neo-Victorian Negotiations of Hostility, Empathy, and Hospitality provides a contextual overview of the concept of hospitality, focusing on Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, as well as on other critics such as Tracy McNulty, Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, who have greatly contributed to the development of the notion. Hospitality involves crossing borders; it hovers over the fluid relationship between host and guest, ‘self’ and ‘other,’ home and the unhomely, which also reflects current anxieties and preoccupations. In addition, the introduction discusses neo-Victorianism as a movement which bears similarities with hospitality’s tension between welcoming and distancing. The authors of the collected essays open up new ways of understanding neo-Victorianism through the critical lens of hospitality, and in so doing, they lay bare and challenge cultural discourses about ‘othering’ in the Victorian period and today.