The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
... In order to support this, this literature review aims to navigate the landscape of theories surrounding these topics. Beginning with a contextualisation of the Gothic genre, the first section of this literature review will start by examining Sedgwick's (1980) influential research on Gothic conventions, before moving on to perspectives from Halberstam (1995), Benshoff (1997) and about the typical monsters within the genre. The second section will then look at specific discourse concerning Edward Scissorhands (1990), reviewing , Potter (1992), Spooner (2013) and Siegel's (2013) viewpoints on the cultural references embedded in Edward's design and how they connect with ideas of Otherness and monstrousness. ...
... However, while Sedgwick (1980), Crow (2013) and Benshoff (1997) all provide compelling insights on the defining elements of the Gothic, it is important to note that their research is solely based around Gothic literature. These theorists in particular have not explored the applicability of their insights to film, and it is true that Gothic conventions for screen would potentially require particular consideration due to the highly visual nature of film as opposed to literature, where the imagination of the reader is replaced with explicit visuals. ...
... Blank is thus condemned to live through vivisepulture. The ending in TIS, as Sedgwick (1986) describes, is "where the book simply seems to die from exhaustion" (11). The narrator appears in the last two pages of the novel to interrupt the textual loop of Blank's life, as if the repetition of Blank's story is already exhausting the narrator. ...
Gothic-postmodernism" builds upon the shared ontological inquiry into the nature of reality inherent in both the Gothic and postmodernism. By adapting most of the thematic and narrative elements of the Gothic to postmodernist fiction, this genre enables new interpretations of self-reflective literature, where the Gothic sublime manifests itself through textual erasure as Gothic-postmodernist horror. This article argues that Travels in the Scriptorium is Auster's significant contribution to Gothic-postmodernism, given its self-reflexivity as postmodernist metafiction and its Gothic aspirations in merging Gothic conventions with postmodern techniques. In Auster's exhaustive metafiction, postmodernism plays a pivotal role in the text's sublimity and the resultant horror of textuality, which creates a profound sense of awe and fear. This is achieved through the text's exploration of reality's fragmented nature, the manipulation of narrative form, and the meta-awareness of its own fictionality. These elements collectively create a sense of awe and terror, challenging the representation of fictional truth through the very medium of language.
... In its evocation and exploration of symbolic, intangible Gothic elements, such as "unnatural echoes and silences . . . the unspeakable," and "the poisonous effects of guilt and shame," Mare of Easttown positions the notion of bad mothering as in need of critique. 70 "We don't even talk about him, Mum," Mare's daughter, Siobhan, drunkenly confesses: "You should have been the one . . . I hate you for that. ...
While complex women in contemporary television are, as Svenja Hohenstein and Katharina Thalmann contend, “no longer a niche phenomenon,” the antiheroine continues to be defined by her relationship to motherhood, sexuality, and violence. This essay contrasts antiheroines Camille Preaker and Mare Sheehan from HBO's Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown and argues that the antiheroine is premised on a disturbed mother-daughter dynamic that complexly manifests in two key opposing ways: in Sharp Objects, as the destruction of both self and other via a dynamic that is monstrous and devouring; and in Mare of Easttown, as a source of reconciliation and healing through a redemptive vision of the maternal. Both series confront the idea that the antiheroine's moral failings are a result of bad mothering, a familiar patriarchal trope that is simultaneously challenged and upheld in the narratives. Importantly, while they differ in their responses to essentialist patriarchal ideologies, Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown position patriarchy as the true monster and suggest that control over the self can be gained through resisting the notions of the maternal taint.
... O "Sublime a partir do romantismo é visto nas forças poderosas da natureza, o Sublime é uma mescla de assombro, horror e deleite, [...] referente a um êxtase e transcendência que a obra literária causaria ao leitor" (GUERRA, 2018, p. 173). Observa-se que "o sublime está associado a qualidades 'masculinas'de força e tamanho (aquelas capazes de invocar admiração, temor ou terror); o belo, com qualidades 'femininas' de pequenez, suavidade e delicadeza"(TROTT, 1998, p. 81 apud WHITMORE, 2013 ).Assim, as forças evocadas pela natureza e pela sua grandiosidade, encontradas em romances góticos como Drácula, podem ser identificadas como sublimes.Os ecos, sons e mensagens indecifráveis são temas recorrentes nas narrativas góticas(SEDGWICK 1986, p. 9-10, apud JONES, 2010. Tais ecos podem ser interpretados como formas sonoras do duplo.As mensagens indecifráveis podem ser produto de efeitos sonoros, o que gera efeitos de descontinuidade e fragmentação, também aspectos presentes nas narrativas góticas. ...
Este trabalho deriva de uma pesquisa de tese que estudou o romance Drácula e as características góticas encontradas no texto. Ao trabalharmos com uma perspectiva que abrangia também os aspectos sonoros durante a análise, foi possível perceber que há, no romance, marcas importantes que dizem tanto sobre a literatura gótica, quanto sobre os entrelaçamentos nas relações entre música, sociedade e natureza, formando, assim, uma paisagem sonora.
... The fear-factor, nevertheless, figures prominently in the introspective essays. And it is made manifest in four main forms -unhappy memories, unpleasant places, unspeakable others, uncanny outcomes -which broadly accord with Gothic norms (Sedgwick, 1986). ...
As if to thwart psychoanalysis, nightmares in Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya do not present signs and symbols that need to be decoded in order to give us a clearer picture of the protagonist Victoria’s unconscious self, but rather feature characters who are quite clearly recognisable as the unsublimated cast of her waking life. Instead of gesturing at a proto-Freudian understanding of dreams as manifesting material that needs to be decoded, the novel opens a lens onto pre-Freudian theories of dreaming that still held currency for Dacre’s readership: dreams as signs from an external, rather than an internal, power, and nightmares as symptoms of bad physical health. As well as functioning as a bridge to these extra-textual theories, Zofloya also draws on the specifically gothic literary possibilities afforded by nightmares. The continuity between Victoria’s nightmares and her reality affirm Eve Sedgwick’s observation that the archetypal “Gothic dream” is a “duplication of the surrounding reality,” but nightmaring in Zofloya goes a step further when the oneiric realm itself becomes prey to Victoria’s will via the machinations of her diabolically aligned servant, the titular Moor Zofloya. This intervention into dreamspace helps to mark Victoria out as a uniquely extreme and sensational gothic villain.
In Catherine Lacey's Pew (2020), a congregation in an unnamed town in the American South, discovers a mysterious figure—Pew—sleeping on a pew. Pew's gender, age, and racial identity are indistinguishable, and as the townspeople grapple with Pew's identity, they disclose their worries and confidences in monological conversations with Pew, as the latter remains silent. This paper aims to examine the intersection of Gothic and Posthuman themes that portray Pew as an outsider whose silence disrupts the community's social cohesion. Pew's silence reveals how the absence of language can provoke both intrigue and fear as it destabilizes the community bonds and boundaries that language typically reinforces. Pew can be understood as a posthuman figure whose fluid and undefinable selfhood challenges normative concepts of identity definition and reveals contemporary fears of otherness linked to concepts such as queer identities, trust, innocence, and transparency.
This article delineates the Romantic tropology of the oubliette, a vertically enclosed dungeon whose etymology derives from the French oublier [to forget] and thus denotes the annihilation of the imprisoned subject. In readings of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), it argues that two prominent genres of the Romantic Age—the Gothic novel and the slave narrative—transformed this terrifying dungeon from a symbol of the ancien régime into a portable trope responsive to the atrocities of a Gothicized Atlantic World.
A content warning: Over the past decade Melissa Makala (2013), Dara Downey (2014), Emma Liggins (2020), and others have offered essential focus on nineteenth-century women’s ghost stories, which had been largely absent in Gothic criticism. I hope to find and discuss the maternal gaze in these tales, but first I wanted to untangle the knots the governess’ maternal gaze has woven in The Turn of the Screw. However, like everyone else I find myself caught in her cat’s cradle, and trying to understand the governess’ meaning has led me to question my own perception. I have concluded it is impossible and this is her trick, her distraction technique, so I hope what follows is coherent.
I currently teach a first-year undergraduate module ‘Dark Matters: Visualizing Gothic literature’ in a school of Art and Design. Photography, animation, illustration, and fashion students use Stoker’s Dracula to assess components of visual design within the novel’s themes and characterization and the possible application of these within their creative disciplines. The emphasis of classroom activities is on textual analysis of aesthetic techniques expressing corporeality and body dissolution, liminality, and spatial boundaries. Students analyze existing visual interpretations of Dracula and interrogate the expression of themes and concepts within the visual domain to develop skills of critical thinking within their own practice as artists and designers. This chapter will document this approach and evaluate the role that Dracula can perform in nurturing interdisciplinary approaches incorporating literature, still/moving images, and material culture that subsequently feed students’ creativity.
This book defines the cinematic Gothic as an intergeneric, transnational, and transhistorical aesthetics of memory. It suggests that the cross-border movements of those I call ‘travelling directors’ had a crucial impact on the emergence, development, and dissemination of the Gothic. This approach expands the canon to filmmakers and national traditions that have not received much attention in the context of the Gothic and supports an examination of the aesthetic as exilic at its core. I consider memory and processes of manual re-membering to be structural to the aesthetic’s carefully staged ‘sensuous geographies’ (Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place . London: Routledge, 1994). Guided by three key concepts—memory, travelling, and touch—this volume encourages a reappraisal of traditional modes of reading the Gothic by redrawing its scope, retracing its origins, and refocusing attention on surfaces as sites of meaning. In urging the reader to think about the cinematic Gothic in these terms, and through a range of disciplines, this book extends previous scholarship and breaks new ground for investigating not only areas that have eluded critical study, such as the role of hands in film, but also prioritises issues relevant to current academic discourse on memory, migration, and the senses.
This article aims to apply Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories on performativity to evaluate examples of queer performativity in the FX original series, What We Do in the Shadows. The series uses symbolism to code characters as queer, as well as modern-day performative acts such as fashion choices, chosen family, preservation, and antiques, and attending pride parades. The article uses visual imagery and a corpus of fifty scripts from the series to conduct a content analysis. Taking a mixed methodological approach, the article explores the impact of queer performativity on its fanbase’s creation of memes and fan fiction.
Provoking questions about morality and civility, survival narratives which feature young adults often offer new visions of social organisation by positing extreme scenarios of isolation and breakdown. In Showtime's Yellowjackets, the survivor-protagonists are framed as monstrous, but also as disruptive "others" with the potential to unravel regulatory systems. By resisting gendered mythologies, the survivor-protagonists are associated with varying expressions of autonomy and agency, and an amplified sense of difference and abjection. In considering the subversive potential of an all-female Lord of the Flies, this paper explores how the central characters of Yellowjackets gain power by accessing and enacting forms of "otherness" in violent and radical ways. It argues that by rejecting the norms used to relegate women to the margins, the Yellowjackets profoundly unsettle, even corrupt, traditional conceptions of femininity and idealised visions of girlhood. ARTICLE HISTORY
This paper examines the commodification of aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel is most extensively investigated within the artistic context employed, where Wilde’s approach to art, aesthetics and beauty is regarded as surviving on a transcendental ground. Indeed, despite his identity as a decadent of fin de siècle Britain, and his depreciating critique of the middle and working class for their material pursuits, Wilde gets conceptually closer to the capitalist stream of consumption. The novel ostensibly highlights aestheticism, and hence, art living for its sake on the lines of the manner Wilde launches himself to the world of artistry and literature, particularly through the characters of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry. However, the deep desire to experience artistic pleasure and beauty, as illustrated mainly by Dorian, gets along very well with, and ends up as, the British materialist pursuit. Dorian’s initial position as the embodiment of beauty degenerates due to the same dynamic of beauty commodifying itself, and so, the others implementing it. The very commodities where aesthetic pleasure is sought commodify the aesthete. Wilde's use of ornamental and decorative elements, Dorian’s search for eternal youth, and the whole structuration of aestheticism in the novel necessitate a political reading of the text, calling for the recognition of colonial, material and modernist platform the narrative deeply bases itself on.
This paper attempts to examine the Gothic elements present in the setting and theme of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem written by S. T. Coleridge and published in 1798. In the poem, Coleridge utilizes certain effects, such as supernatural events entailing death, decay, and mystery, which all allude to the Gothic tradition. Some have associated Coleridge's writings with "Gothic Romanticism," and his poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" may be said to fall under this category. Gothic fiction includes stories characterized by an atmosphere of fear and the occurrence of strange events. From the setting, which is set in an unusual and strange environment, to the style of narration, which is a story within a story narrated by a mariner to a wedding guest, numerous elements of Gothic fiction can be pointed out in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".
This article explores how Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022) cement a reliance on Gothic literary minimalism. Although minimalism and the Gothic are traditionally positioned as aesthetic opposites, with the former orientated toward stylistic sparsity and the latter an art of excess, I examine how both converge in these interconnected novels to further an affective atmosphere of lessness and loss. Recalling McCarthy’s prior affiliation with both aesthetic contexts, I argue that these novels consider the emptiness of genre and event via a pre-established aesthetic of Gothic minimalism borrowed from postwar American literary traditions to expose societal structures of exhaustion. Through a reading of McCarthy’s duology alongside key minimalists from the twentieth century including Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, I suggest that this attenuation of the Gothic is symptomatic of a significant but unacknowledged affective tonality underpinning American minimalist writing.
This paper explores the interactions of nostalgic and gothic tendencies in Ray Bradbury’s representations of the home, a recurring symbol in his fiction of the postwar period and in the American cultural imagination of the time. Bradbury’s fiction complicates various ideals associated with and invested in the postwar American home, and paired stories often suggest different responses to specific domestic themes. The essay concludes by arguing that several Bradbury stories offer possible alternatives to the problematic ideal of the “detached,” “nuclear” family home. The argument thus also usefully recontextualizes a number of Bradbury’s best-known stories.
Recent scholarship has argued for a Western basis for the Judge Dee Mysteries, a detective fiction series by Sinologist Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) set in Tang China. But these studies primarily focus on how Chinese elements are recreated to cater to Anglophone readers’ tastes, neglecting to discuss their actual Western origins in any detail. This paper will make the attempt by focusing on one of the novels, The Haunted Monastery, to investigate how Gothic Taoism is projected through the internal organization of the semantic universe (characters, settings, and conflicts) in the multiple worlds of this detective fiction. It observes how van Gulik recreates anti-religious conventions in the traditional Western Gothic novel and in Chinese courtroom fiction. This artistic innovation highlights the dual facets of Taoism in the story, as it navigates between the realms of crime and faith. On the one hand, it faces the purely divine world, while on the other, it faces the secular world dominated by limitless desire.
The portrayal of otherness within Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands (1990) serves as a compelling critique of American conservative normativity. This paper investigates Tim Burton's use of both aesthetic and social othering to illuminate the plight of the outsider within the confines of mainstream American suburbia, offering a nuanced perspective on Burton’s sociopolitical commentary. Burton aesthetically others Edward by appropriating visual markers of several different forms of otherness. Additionally, the characters in the film socially other Edward, ostracising him because of their conservative, conformist attitudes. This investigation takes the opportunity to address oversights in the academic publications on Edward Scissorhands, adopting a more comprehensive approach to the range of references and allusions in the film, and argues via a close reading of the film that Edward is a polysemic, heterogeneous character, abstracted from any specific real identity. He embodies an array of marginalised and othered identities, encompassing neurodiversity, queer identity and outsider subculture identity, among others. Ultimately, this paper concludes that the film condemns the perpetual objectification, exploitation, and rejection typically faced by several forms of marginalised people in American society.
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) serves as a psychological horror prequel to the Twin Peaks series created by Lynch and Mark Frost (1990-1991), focusing on Laura Palmer's final days before her brutal murder. Unlike the original series, known for its blend of mystery and quirky humour, the film presents a much darker and more intimate look into Laura’s private life and her traumatic experiences. Despite its initial critical and commercial failure, Fire Walk with Me stands out as a vivid showcase of Lynch's personal style of surrealism, presenting surrealistic manipulations of time, space and character. This paper examines how Lynch's techniques - such as the fragmentation and dilation of time, use of dreamscapes and the depiction of surreal, uncanny characters - are used to explore the theme of trauma and offer a sympathetic and harrowing insight into the psyche of a rape trauma survivor.
This essay explores Nnedi Okorafor’s engagement with the traumatic consequences of a civil war in Africa through the shapeshifting motif in her novel Who Fears Death (2010). It argues that the interaction between Africanjujuism and globalgothic allows her to transcend the specificities of the conflict and address the transgenerational effects of ethnic violence as a global problem. Okorafor employs Africanjujuism to describe the protagonist’s shapeshifting as a means of healing, empowerment, and knowledge. In contrast, she uses Gothic tropes to depict extreme violence. Representing a girl born of wartime rape as the trickster god Eshu, who adds hope to a dark moment in history, constitutes a strong critique of a society in which women victims of war rape are often ignored and their children stigmatized.
This article examines the pioneering American weird literature writer Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) through the critical lens of the ecogothic, arguing that he resituates the gothic within the real or imagined landscapes of the American frontier, his ‘frontier gothic’ epitomized by the image of ‘the cabin in the woods’. In his writings, the frontier gothic becomes transitional boundary genre on the ‘frontier’ between the earlier gothic and later folk horror, where not just isolated cabins of lone prospectors, but whole rural communities find themselves in a similarly abject, ruinous moral condition. The liminal ‘frontier’ nature of the ecogothic is repeated in miniature in the specific way in which abandoned cabins in isolated gulches become ecogothic ‘day-old’ ruins, quite distinct from a gothic ruin in its lacking civilized boundaries between interior and exterior, culture and nature, epitomized by the image of ‘blank windows’ and doorless doorways.
Although casual readers of Northanger Abbey often still interpret the novel as a straightforward parody of the Gothic, a range of critics have pinpointed the realistically Gothic horrors that do reside in Austen’s narrative. This essay applies a similar lens to crime novelist Val McDermid’s understudied and underappreciated retelling of Northanger Abbey, arguing that the new version of Austen’s text employs the form of Gothic writing in which the most horrifying types of violence are gendered everyday injuries: experiences of gaslighting and denials of physical and verbal agency. Responding to reviewer criticism that has painted the new Northanger Abbey as pointlessly derivative, I also argue that McDermid innovates on Austen’s original narrative by refiguring the novel’s conclusion, giving her version of Catherine Morland an assertive voice with which to resist Gothic psychological violence. In this reimagined ending, the figure of General Tilney becomes defined by his anti-queer bigotry, highlighting the gothicism of pathological heteronormativity and the importance of intersectional approaches to feminist resistance. Grasping how McDermid’s Gothic approach both echoes and innovates on the rich complexities of Austen’s novel is key to recuperating this contemporary text.
En base a Freud y Lacan, se analiza cómo el efecto siniestro producido por la amenaza al ‘degollamiento’ en “El matadero” (1871) de Esteban Echeverría y Amalia (1851-55) de José Mármol es la causa ontológica del horror gótico que atraviesa las narrativas. Ello ocurre porque la decapitación evoca la “castración simbólica” qua trauma (funda)mental del sujeto (la pérdida del goce corporal-libidinal causada por el lenguaje). El descabezamiento indica que algo secreto de la condición humana, que debió permanecer oculto, al ser revelado, invade la existencia psíquica. Esta emoción, que descentra el cogito cartesiano, apuntala la configuración de la estética del horror gótico.
This chapter considers how witches are remembered and re-remembered as monsters in popular culture texts, and how feminist acts of activist memory have (re-)structured and (re-)shaped these memories to align with feminist politics and principles. Feminist acts of remembering the witch as a monster not only reconceptualize what makes her monstrous, but also turn her monstrosity into a source of power. This chapter explores how the witch’s monstrosity is aligned with abjection, queerness, and utopianism in popular culture texts, and how these modes of witchy monstrosity are re-remembered (or re-membered) in feminist activist memory. Consequently, this chapter considers the paradox at the heart of feminist activist memories of the witch: the witch’s horror is not erased or removed but is remembered and revised in light of contemporary mnemonic and political necessities.KeywordsMonsterWitchAbjectUtopiaCampFeminist memory
Como objetivo desse trabalho, buscou-se observar como esse sujeito pós-colonial se expressa e como se dá a busca por identidade(s) a partir da análise de uma obra do gênero gótico, o romance Murther and walking spirits, do canadense Robertson Davies, que apresenta em sua obra várias facetas do pós-colonialismo, que às vezes explora o ponto de vista do canadense nato, às vezes do inglês quem fugido da guerra, vai para o Canadá ou ainda do escocês que imigra em busca de novas oportunidades no novo mundo. Os personagens de Davies, principalmente o fantasma, transitam por diversas eras, expondo a visão de um sujeito que até pouco tempo vivia o pós-colonialismo de um país que, por mais que goze de uma certa liberdade, ainda hoje vive subjugado pela coroa britânica, ao mesmo tempo que é constantemente sobreposto pelo poderio econômico e cultural dos EUA, se encontrando, dessa forma, no limiar de mundos.
Colson Whitehead’s underground railroad is the site of a survival so minimal that it seems to offer no sanctuary from either physical brutality or the legal fictions that reduce Black people to property. His young protagonist, Cora, escapes the plantation in a literal train, hurtling through cold, dank, dark tunnels, in unknown directions, according to a mysterious timetable. Invoking a gothic spatial dynamic, the book obstructs the idealisation of the underground railroad, demystifies its function as permanent refuge, and inhibits empathy. I argue that the medieval legal history of sanctuary—a site of flight, disorientation, and contingent survival—offers conceptual insight into Whitehead’s novel of fugitivity. Medieval sanctuary allows us a perspective from which Whitehead’s dank underground railroad appears as a meaning-making machine, a site where Cora can forge an insistent, if wavering, social personhood.
Edgar Alan Poe and Edith Wharton found a way to give their own stories more realistic descriptions and details. The objectives of this research paper are to compare Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado (1846) and Wharton’s Roman Fever (1934) to know how these tales are structured, to describe how their methods works and how similar they can be. To meet these objectives, both stories were read and analysed so that every foreshadowing clue could be detached from the texts and organized in two tables, Group (1), concerning physical elements, such as titles, names of characters, and objects described, and Group (2), concerning events that took important roles in the stories, such as past events and confessions of the hideous crimes. After gathering all this information together, it was possible to compare those two tables and realise that both authors do have a particular way of thinking about the logic behind the plots by leaving clues throughout the stories that may be only recognized when the reader gets to the end.
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In India, a popular trope is adapting cultural myths and religious iconographies into visceral images of the monster in literary and visual representations. Cinematic representations of the Indian monster are modelled on existing folklore narratives and religious tales where the idea of the monster emerges from cultural imagination and superstitions of the land. Since it rationalizes several underlying archetypes in which gods are worshipped in their monstrous identities and disposition, the trope of the monster is used in cinema to indicate the transformation from an ordinary human figure to a monstrous human Other. This paper examines cinematic adaptations of monster figures in Malayalam cinema, the South Indian film industry of Kerala. The cultural practice of religious rituals that worship monstrous gods is part of the collective imagination of the land of Kerala through which films represent fearsome images of transformed humans. This article argues that cultural monsters are human subjects that take inspiration from mythical monster stories to perform in a terrifying way. Their monstrous disposition is a persona that is both a powerful revelation of repressed desires and a manifestation of the resistance against certain cultural fears associated with them. The analysis of several Malayalam films, such as Kaliyattam (1997) Manichithrathazhu (1993) and Ananthabhadram (2005), reveals how film performance adapts mythological narrative elements to create new cultural intertexts of human monsters that are psychotically nuanced and cinematically excessive.
Casa de muñecas (2012) de Patricia Esteban Erlés es una obra en cuyo seno abundan temas femeninos y feministas: el confinamiento en el ambiente doméstico, las experiencias de violencia, las maneras de escaparse del enredo del patriarcado, etcétera. En ella, la narración doble (textual y visual), la estructura (subordinada a la temática) y la convención literaria (narrativa fantástica y gótica) junto con un sinfín de elementos paratextuales son factores que inducen ciertos afectos en los lectores y el despertar de emociones concretas. El presente artículo constituye un intento de traducción de algunos conceptos del giro afectivo al estudio de textos literarios, que aspira a dar respuesta a las siguientes preguntas: ¿cómo es que el narrador intenta estimular el afecto de los lectores? ¿En qué medida la forma literaria (como cognado de la noción sociológica y psicológica del «ambiente») es capaz de afectar a los lectores? ¿Qué recursos literarios y componentes extradiegéticos inducen el afecto? ¿Puede la misma estructura del texto influenciarlo?
A persistent subject-matter of Poe’s, from Usher, through tales such as Ligeia and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, to his cosmic prose-poem, Eureka, is the borderline between life and death, the moment when matter becomes “unparticled.” Poe’s imagination is fundamentally conditioned by Ancient Greek atomic theory as it comes down through Lucretius. Using this theory, Poe provides the most extensive body of work of minds in extremis in the nineteenth century, often literally so. This essay will focus on how atomic theory is refashioned by Poe into a unique contribution to the literature of terror.
The Late Modernist Novel explores how the novel reinvented itself for a Modernist age, a world riven by war and capitalist expansion. Seo Hee Im argues that the Anglophone novel first had to disassociate itself from the modern nation-state and, by extension, national history, which had anchored the genre from its very inception. Existing studies of modernism show how the novel responded to the crisis in the national idea. Polyglot high modernists experimented with cosmopolitanism and multilingualism on the level of style, while the late modernists retreated to a literary nativism. This book explores a younger generation of writers that incorporated empirical structures as theme and form to expand the genre beyond the nation-state.
I read Perry’s Melmoth through the lens of memory scholar Michael Rothberg’s 2019 The Implicated Subject, which provides a conceptual framework for moving beyond the victim/perpetrator binary when considering responsibility for historical violence and its legacies. I argue that in Melmoth, Perry uses gothic forms such as the tale and the found manuscript in ways that allow the reader to experience the moral and ethical dilemmas raised by the acts of violence and genocide that the novel references, including the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. At the same time, however, I argue that Perry’s innovative revision of another gothic convention, the Wandering Jew legend, reinforces or even extends problematic representations of Jewish-Christian relations found in Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer. By reimagining Melmoth’s “sin” as failure to bear witness to the truth of Christ’s resurrection, Perry’s narrative unwittingly re-inscribes the Christian supersessionism that so deeply informs Maturin’s work.
The reception of François Truffaut’s 1975 film L’Histoire d’Adèle H., dealing with the obsession and descent into madness of the daughter of Victor Hugo, has recurrently focused on its critical engagement with Romantic melodrama, as well as its literary and ‘romanesque’ dimensions. This article argues that the term ‘romanesque’ has camouflaged the film’s active engagement with both cinematic and literary Gothic heritage. This engagement is shown to be inextricably linked to dynamic tensions of paternal influence. Both Truffaut as director and Adèle Hugo as film character actively renegotiate the Father’s artistic heritage of violent passions and dark metaphysical forces, with differing results. The article proposes a double analysis: (a) a close reading of the film’s Gothic tropes, shedding light on Truffaut’s intertextual dialogue with Hitchcock, his favourite ‘Gothic’ father and (b) an examination of the character Adèle H.’s intertextual performance, in which she contends with the powerful Gothico-Romantic myth embodied by the literary patriarch Victor Hugo. This will lead to extended insight into Truffaut’s brand of filmic Gothic as a vehicle of haunted intensity and on his distinctive exploration of the torments of female subjectivity, haunting and neurosis.
I denna artikel prövas en läsning av Viktor Rydbergs Singoalla ur ett skevperspektiv. Fokus sätts på barnkonstruktionen i texten. Singoalla presenteras som en hybrid- roman med skräckromantiska inslag, vilket påverkar hur karaktären Sorgbarn, sonen till huvudprotagonisterna Singoalla och Erland, konstrueras. Genom att det skräckromantiska lyfts fram diskuteras Sorgbarn som en skev gestalt som avviker från den idealistiska norm utifrån vilken barnframställningen i Rydbergs litterära produktion annars konstrueras. Med Sorgbarns skevhet avses att han, till skillnad från de idealiserade barngestalterna i Rydbergs övriga författarskap, förmedlar och genererar begär som inte låter sig harmoniskt integreras i hand- lingen. Gossens skevhet diskuteras i relation till det kusliga, det monstruösa och queera begär. Sorgbarns blotta närvaro i sin far Erlands slott leder till ett förfall av Erlands psyke, vilket i denna artikel diskuteras genom Freuds husmetafor. Romanen läses som en text som handlar om att förlora kontrollen över begär, förmedlade och genererade genom pojkkroppen.
La reflexión en torno al enigma de la feminidad, entendido como la idea cultural e histórica de lo que supone ser mujer, es una de las cuestiones centrales en la obra de Patricia Esteban Erlés. Dicha noción se canaliza en su narrativa a través de núcleos temáticos como la representación de la corporeidad, el posicionamiento social o el rechazo de ciertos discursos normativos. Partiendo de la estructura simbólica de Casa de muñecas, cuyos microrrelatos ofrecen un compendio de distintos paradigmas de mujer, la intención de este trabajo es analizar la construcción de la subjetividad femenina en los textos breves e hiperbreves de la autora. Para ello se considerarán aspectos como las alusiones culturales, la intertextualidad, la estética, el subtexto ideológico, el lenguaje o los motivos recurrentes que contribuyen a visualizar las distintas alegorías de lo femenino.
In the aftermath of crushed political revolution, forms of protest become curiously circular and conflicted. Drawing on literary and visual representations of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, this essay analyzes new circuits of demands that break with the project of successful revolutionary ends and demonstrate an investment in the satisfying interminability of protest that cannot be suppressed or punished. It brings into view a range of protesting figures engaged in an ongoing alteration of the colonial relation to argue that the eccentric gaps between process and purpose are useful for thinking through the satisfactions of anticolonialism.
Charlotte Bronte's 'New' Gothic
- C Robert
- Martin Rathbum
- Steinmann
'"Charlotte Bronte's 'New' Gothic," From Jane Austen to Joseph
Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory o f James T. Hillhouse, ed. Robert C.
Rathbum and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1958), p. 123.
2Heilman, "Charlotte Bronte's 'New' Gothic," p. 131.
3Heilman, "Charlotte Bronte's 'New' Gothic," p. 131.
4Heilman, "Charlotte Bronte's 'New' Gothic," p. 127.