摘要：S cholars in neo-Victorian studies have often configured themselves around the idea of haunting and hauntedness (see Arias and Pulham 2009; Mitchell 2010). Contemporary culture is still haunted by the nineteenth century's vision of the future, an idea explored by works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993) and the Steampunk movement. This special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies seeks to embed neo-Victorian scholarship more firmly into another space of hauntedness – the theatre and, more broadly, performance culture. As Marvin Carlson has famously suggested, theatre itself is a haunted practice, summoning up ghosts of past productions, styles and performances, often inherited from the Victorian age. Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis draw attention to a similar set of arguments when they trace the shift in academic fashion from the study of 'theatre' to 'performance'. Drawing on the theorists Herbert Blau, Elin Diamond and Philip Auslander, Shepherd and Wallis suggest that 'performance' is haunted by its repressed associations with theatre, even as these critics frequently deny its influence (Shepherd and Wallis 2004: 151- 2). Given the many ways that the Victorian era has colonised the popular imagination in terms of our expectations of what theatre is – the red curtain, the limelight, the solid three-dimensional set, the darkened hushed atmosphere, the ornate gilded auditorium – this influence is particularly hard, even futile, to repress in neo-Victorian performance. So neo-Victorian live events often mix elements of the 'old theatre' – nineteenth-century venues, costume and spectacle – with 'new performance', such as projections, recorded sound, and different configurations of performance space, actor-audience relations, performance styles and scripting or devising practices.
