Course Description: (at least 50 Chinese characters or 200 English letters.)
Japanese ACG (anime, comics, games) has become an increasing popular topic for cultural studies in recent years, given its impact on the shaping of the otaku (sub-)culture, diverse audience and subject matters, and its hybridisation of Japanese and Western cultures. The cross-cultural feature is particularly significant in works with characters, settings, or aesthetics based on Victorian England, while at the same time these ‘neo-Victorian’ works recreate a series of new cultural icons that mingle the conventional ACG moe elements and the ‘traditional’ English culture of Victorianism. As scholar Anna Maria Jones points out, ‘many neo-Victorian manga offer interesting examples of transnational and transhistorical appropriations’ (2015: 21). Hence this course seeks to evaluate relevant literature and ACG works alike to find out the ways in which Neo-Victorian Japanese ACG works facilitate ‘transnational and transhistorical appropriations’.