This Pivot examines a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with
the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating including cannibalism. Not only is the
imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature the theme
of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their
Victorian prototypes thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary
and the Victorian. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho argues that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen
as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction demonstrating how
cannibalism provides a framework for understanding the genre's origin its conflicted
ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and
gothic effects that it generates in its fiction.
