British Romanticism and Denmark / Nordic Terrors: Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature

The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, also known as the period of Romanticism, were marked with the interest of the authors in nature and emotions, but also in the supernatural, horrible and the exotic. Although it was the era of reason and the progress of sciences, critics have identified the significance of the Gothic influence on the works of most of the English Romantic figures, among which Lord Byron is known to have had the major influence on the creation and persistence of the vampire figure, as a Gothic trope, haunting the last and this century’s literature and film. This paper attempts to unravel the origins and nature of the mysterious cultural appeal to the literary vampire by tracing its origins from Eastern European folklore, the first poem titled “Der Vampir”(1743) by Heinrich Ossenfelder, to the German Sturm and Drang poets, such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Gottfried August Buerger and their respective poems “Die Braut von Korinth” (1789) and “Lenore” (1773). The role of British ballad writers Southey, Lewis and Scott and their ballad collections will be considered as a significant effort to “renew the spirit” of British poetry which according to Scott had reached “a remarkably low ebb in Britain” (as cited in Thomson, 2002, p.80). Another literary figure engaged in writing Gothic ballads following the tradition of Mathew Lewis, not so well-known during her time, was the Scottish writer Anne Bannerman. Her ballad “Dark Ladie” deserves special attention in this context, as it features a female character who is transformed from the previous ballad tradition: from a passive victim of male seduction, here she becomes a fatal woman who comes back from the undead to seek for revenge and initiates the line of female vampires such as Keats’s “Lamia” and Coleridge’s “Christabel”. Thus, this paper elaborates on the major contributors to the Gothic stream in poetry in the specific period, mainly ballads, and traces the presence and development of Gothic elements and vampiric features. The continuous appeal to the Gothic found its place in the works of several major English Romantics, even though they put great effort to differentiate their poetry from the popular literature of the day – Gothic novels. This paper will concentrate on Lord Byron’s Oriental tale The Giaour (1813) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Both works incorporate Gothic themes, settings and characters, but there hasn’t been much literary focus with reference to the vampire theme they are based on. Although, critics have observed the contribution of the ambivalent vampire figure in Romantic literature, critical evaluation of the growth of this Gothic character in these two poems until now is incomplete. Hence, we will focus on Byron and Coleridge’s appropriation of the vampire figure and their contribution to the growth of this character. The various metaphoric usages of this character will also be explored and defined to determine their purpose.

The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, also known as the period of Romanticism, were marked with the interest of the authors in nature and emotions, but also in the supernatural, horrible and the exotic. Although it was the era of reason and the progress of sciences, critics have identified the significance of the Gothic influence on the works of most of the English Romantic figures, among which Lord Byron is known to have had the major influence on the creation and persistence of the vampire figure, as a Gothic trope, haunting the last and this century’s literature and film. This paper attempts to unravel the origins and nature of the mysterious cultural appeal to the literary vampire by tracing its origins from Eastern European folklore, the first poem titled “Der Vampir”(1743) by Heinrich Ossenfelder, to the German Sturm and Drang poets, such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Gottfried August Buerger and their respective poems “Die Braut von Korinth” (1789) and “Lenore” (1773). The role of British ballad writers Southey, Lewis and Scott and their ballad collections will be considered as a significant effort to “renew the spirit” of British poetry which according to Scott had reached “a remarkably low ebb in Britain” (as cited in Thomson, 2002, p.80). Another literary figure engaged in writing Gothic ballads following the tradition of Mathew Lewis, not so well-known during her time, was the Scottish writer Anne Bannerman. Her ballad “Dark Ladie” deserves special attention in this context, as it features a female character who is transformed from the previous ballad tradition: from a passive victim of male seduction, here she becomes a fatal woman who comes back from the undead to seek for revenge and initiates the line of female vampires such as Keats’s “Lamia” and Coleridge’s “Christabel”. Thus, this paper elaborates on the major contributors to the Gothic stream in poetry in the specific period, mainly ballads, and traces the presence and development of Gothic elements and vampiric features. The continuous appeal to the Gothic found its place in the works of several major English Romantics, even though they put great effort to differentiate their poetry from the popular literature of the day – Gothic novels. This paper will concentrate on Lord Byron’s Oriental tale The Giaour (1813) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). Both works incorporate Gothic themes, settings and characters, but there hasn’t been much literary focus with reference to the vampire theme they are based on. Although, critics have observed the contribution of the ambivalent vampire figure in Romantic literature, critical evaluation of the growth of this Gothic character in these two poems until now is incomplete. Hence, we will focus on Byron and Coleridge’s appropriation of the vampire figure and their contribution to the growth of this character. The various metaphoric usages of this character will also be explored and defined to determine their purpose.

In England, lyric poetry and particularly the novel employed C&P. Educated male Romantics focused on the story’s Greekness and Neoplatonism (Coleridge, Hogg, Blake) and made Psyche their universal immortal Soul (Peacock, Keats, Shelley), enabled by popular translations (Taylor, Gurney). Female writers used Psyche to explore their own lived experiences and social standing, through flawed yet loving Psyche as an easily adaptable paradigm (Tighe). Translations and art representing C&P became more accessible, and poets (Hemans, L.E.L., Mary Shelley, EBB) focused on single emotionally powerful episodes to illustrate images with accompanying poems. Mary Shelley reflects her own life experiences of childbirth and widowhood through poems on Psyche. Novel writers see the plot as generic markers (Gothic novels, Charlotte Turner Smith, EBB) and inspiration for some plot elements, often echoing Apuleius by placing an illustrative image of or allusion to C&P as a mise en abyme into their novel to comment on their plot.

For a Russian reader English Romanticism is associated with poetry. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and Robert Southey, George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Walter Scott are those ones who mirrored the epoch, created new forms and contents of the rhymed word, changed readers’ attitude to poetry. Romanticism poetic genres were translated into Russian as soon as they were written and, even nowadays, new English Romantic poetry translations regularly appear both in print and online. As for prosaic genres, the situation is different. Romanticism essays, periodical reviews, epistolary heritage (letters, diaries, memoirs, etc.) are generally known to literary critics, historians, and experts in the field. Novelists, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley, are popular among contemporary readers, but not as Romanticism authors. University scholars, lecturers and students are acquainted with some Romanticism novelists, among whom Charles Maturin, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas De Quincey, Edward Bulwer-Lytton could be enlisted. English authors of the Gothic and Jacobian novel writers are defined as Pre-Romanticism authors and read episodically. A rare reader knows that poets, George Gordon Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote Gothic novels, and that Romanticism prose is as voluminous as poetry. Globalisation processes have opened more Romanticism pages to the readers both in English and translated from English. The question is still open if the Romanticism novel is authentically attractive to the reader or should be synchronised with the contemporary problems and plots. Another question of the Romanticism heritage mystery is why it is regularly discussed, analysed and re-read by every new generation with genuine excitement of the direct heirs or remote explorers.

More than any of his major American contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe shifted facilely and readily from one vein of prose fiction directly into another. There simply were no well-defined stages in Poe's writing, no set periods during which he concentrated exclusively upon some particular aspect of his prose material. Even the early, abortive Folio Club project was designed for a combination of humorous sketches and Gothic tales. And later as Poe's interests broadened to include satire, philosophy, and ratiocinative themes, he proved quite capable of composing, all within the space of a few months, a characteristic horror story, a burlesque, an analytical tale, and a metaphysical dialogue.

Hallucinogesis: Thomas De Quincey’s Mind Trips Elizabeth Fay (bio) Elizabeth Fay University of Massachusetts Boston Elizabeth Fay Elizabeth Fay’s most recent publication is Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (UP of New England, 2010). Her other publications include Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (Palgrave, 2002), A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Blackwell, 1998), and Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (U of Massachusetts P, 1995). Her current project is on Romantic Egyptology. Footnotes 1. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) 67. All references to the 1821 Confessions, “Suspiria de Protundis,” and “The English Mail-Coach” will be from this edition. All other references are to David Masson’s edition, Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols (Edinburgh: Black, 1897). 2. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997) 48. De Quincey’s Gothicized imagination reveals itself throughout his autobiographical writings, and he wrote a Gothic novel as well, Klosterheim (1832). See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986). 3. Charles J. Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995) 10. 4. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of The Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford UP, 199) 8. 5. Joshua Wilner, “Autobiography and Addiction: The Case of De Quincey,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 14.4 (Winter 1981): 493–503; Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000) 70–75. 6. John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991). 7. Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995). 8. Frederick Burwick reads this economic parallel as one of mental rather than bodily economy in relation to political economy. See Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge and Power (New York: Palgrave, 2001). I take seriously De Quincey’s reference to his physical economy, however: “The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of my physical economy, was from the re-awakening of a state of eye generally incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability” (Confessions 67). 9. See John Barrell’s analysis of self-innoculation as a centering metaphor in De Quincey’s writings (Infection of Thomas De Quincey 15–18). 10. Confessions 5n; this was Hazlitt’s failing, De Quincey informs us: Hazlitt is “an acute thinker” rather than “a subtle one” because “he has not read Plato in his youth (which most likely was only his misfortune); but neither has he read Kant in his manhood (which is his fault).” 11. Burwick complicates this critique, claiming that for De Quincey the sublime must be co-present with reason and imagination (Thomas De Quincey 86). Although Burwick describes the De Quinceyan aesthetic experience, the co-presence of mental faculties applies to the properties of hallucinogesis, with its combinatory mental powers. 12. Barrell, for instance, follows this line of thought when he reads the later revised Malay passage (Masson 3: 402–6) as one in which the Malay is associated with another seaman, the murderous John Williams of “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” a figure De Quincey Orientalizes. By “stoning” the Malay, Williams–through a complex of various other Williams populating De Quincey’s life and texts–the destructive other is ritually defeated (74–76). 13. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) for his discussion of hybridity as that which usefully challenges cultural constructions of identity. 14. See Charles J. Rzepka’s Sacramental Commodities. 15. Tilottama Rajan is behind much of my formulation of a De Quinceyan hermeneutic. See Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980). 16. The essay is a review of Janies Gillman’s biography of Coleridge, his patient and house companion for Coleridge’s final 19 years of life. De Quincey’s essay was first published in 1845, revised in 1859. 17. Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, Immanuel...

Milton’s Heirs: Epic Poetry in the 1790s Joseph Crawford (bio) Joseph Crawford Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, UK Joseph Crawford Joseph Crawford is a junior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. His first book. Raising Milton’s Ghost will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2010. He is presently researching the historical contexts of early gothic literature in English. Footnotes 1. William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry, ed. M. Celeste Williamson (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968) 31. Subsequent citations will be cited in the text by page. 2. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735) 26. 3. Jean Terrasson, A Critical Dissertation upon Homer’s Iliad (London, 1722) 1: 84; Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 146. 4. John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953–1982) 1: 810–14. 5. Amongst these scriptural epics were Samuel Wesley’s History of the New Testament (1701) and History of the Old Testament (1704), Abel Evans’s Prae-Existence (1714), the anonymous The Last Day (1720), Thomas Newcomb’s Last Judgment (1723), William Roberts’ Judah Restored (1774), Elizabeth Smith’s Brethren (1787) and Israel (1789), Mary Scott’s Messiah (1788), Elizabeth Hands’s Death of Amnon (1789), and Ann Holmes’s Adam and Eve (1800). 6. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (London: Oxford UP, 1989) 7. 7. To this list should perhaps be added Helen Maria Williams’ 1784 epic, Peru. Although less overtly concerned with the American Revolutionary War than the poems of Dwight or Barlow, Williams’ celebration of peace-loving Americans resisting invasion by warlike Europeans had obvious resonances with recent events, especially given Williams’ own opposition to the American war. 8. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) 158. 9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) 1: 183. 10. The first reviewers of Southey’s Joon of Arc criticized it for having been written too quickly, suggesting that such haste implied “so slight an opinion of (perhaps) the most arduous effort of human invention.” See Christopher Smith, A Quest For Home (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997) 115. 11. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 137–39, 164–65. 12. Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992) 167–93. 13. Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995) 107. 14. James Ogden, Emmanuel (London, 1797) 130, 110. 15. James Burges, Richard I (London, 1801) 2: 70. 16. James Ogden, Revolution (London, 1790) 42; James Pye, Alfred (London, 1815) 60–61; Richard Cumberland, Calvary (London, 1792) 68–69. 17. Sarah Pyke, Israel (London, 1795) I: V, 2: 8, 2: 147–48; Robert Southey, Joan of Arc (Bristol, 1796) 94. 18. Samuel Wilcocke, Britannia (London, 1797) 12. 19. John Ogilvie, Britannia (London, 1801) 527–34. 20. Hannah Cowley, The Siege of Acre (London, 1801) 88, 124. 21. Walter Savage Landor, Gebir (London, 1798) 60. It was once commonly asserted that the plot of Gebir was inspired by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, but Simon Bainbridge has shown this to be improbable, as Landor began writing it as early as 1796. See Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 32. 22. Of all these epics, The Niliad is the only one of which I have been unable to locate any surviving copies. My information on it comes only from a mention of it in the Critical Review XXV, new arr. (1799), which mocks Hildreth’s use of Classical machinery: “In an epic poem upon a victory so peculiarly attributed to providence, it was injudicious to derive its success from the heathen gods, as, according to the most ancient and orthodox opinions, those deities were the fallen angels. Mr Hildreth has therefore given the glory to the devil” (354–55). 23. John Marchant, “Dedication,” in John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1751) v–vi. 24. George Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964) 16. 25. DNB 14: 618; Curran 164. Copyright © 2010 by the Trustees of Boston University

Abstract: Edmund Burke is a central figure to modern aesthetic reflection. Burke’s theory of the sublime reinforced the tendency of a rising emphasis on the emotional aspects of the work of art, paving the way to a new conception of poetry that deviates from the mimetic notion privileged by Neoclassicism. Although his Philosophical Enquiry (1757) is frequently referred to as the main aesthetic and philosophical foundation of Gothic literature, the treatise is not recognized as a decisive influence on English Romanticism—despite the innumerous points of convergence between the poetics of Gothic and Romantic literature, extensively outlined to date by critical tradition. The aim of this paper is precisely to revisit Burkean thought, with a view to demonstrating that its contribution to the Romantic movement is much greater than it was recognized by tradition. The focus of our analysis will foremost concern the theory of poetry presented by Burke in the fifth and last part of his Enquiry.

The French Revolution was famously described by Edmund Burke as proof that ‘the Age of Chivalry is gone’, and the fall of the French monarchy prompted a major controversy over the value of Britain’s remaining ‘Gothic institutions’. As a result, the shifting ideological sympathies of the British Romantics can be tracked through the changing fashion in which they made use of medieval history and symbolism in their poetic works. This chapter maps out the different ways in which the major British Romantics made use of the medievalist discourses that they inherited from their eighteenth-century predecessors, showing how the Romantics variously depicted the Middle Ages as a dark era of Gothic horrors, an age of feudal oppression, or as the wellspring of Britain’s ‘Gothic liberty’.

E pluribus unum, out of many, one. This motto of political unity continues to circulate ubiquitously in the United States today, almost two and a half centuries after it was introduced in the halls of the Continental Congress. As scholars of early US literature and culture know, the rhetoric of unification played a distinctly reparative role in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which were plagued by numerous forms of political and infrastructural disunity. Recent scholarship on early US literature has embraced a different kind of reparative collectivism. Disenchantment with the kind of exceptional and unitary political agency associated with liberal individualism has given new theoretical life to republicanism and a range of other collectivist imaginaries (publics, cosmopolitanism, and so on). The turn away from individualism and toward the commons of politics has inspired critics to grapple anew with the central metonymic problem of politics: the relation between the part and the whole, which determines how we understand “the people.”Matthew Garrett’s Episodic Poetics takes the vexed relationship between part and whole as its central line of inquiry. Episodic Poetics uses the “episode,” a “subgeneric unit or device” that structures the narrative relation between part and whole (145), to excavate the formal features of the political debates that animated “the period between the constitutional consolidation and the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century” (16). Garrett uses his theorization of what he terms episodicity—“the overproduction of noncumulative narrative, lacking the crucial order of prioritization” (20)—to analyze the structural tensions that haunted the collectivist plots of federalism and nation formation. The use of terms like episodicity make for a dense read, but they speak to Garrett’s concerted effort to identify and theorize the logics that are shared across a number of generically diverse literary and political documents. Garrett’s central historical wager is that “the episode is, as a critical narrative poetics would put it, the ideologeme of the early republic” (21). The episode, as Garrett acknowledges, is not specific to any one period in literary history, but it was, he suggests, uniquely “compelling to readers in the early republic” in part because it gave “literary shape to th[e] dialectic of unification and division” (91, 18).Unity, for Garrett, is a “strange illusion,” but individualism is equally fabular (85). This skepticism toward individualism is apparent in Garrett’s introduction to his reading of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: the “social subject itself,” he playfully observes, “is the dubious hero of this chapter” (61). For Garrett, the true situation of early US politics is located somewhere between the individual and the collective—in the dialectical movement between part and whole that Garrett associates with the episode. Each of the four chapters of Episodic Poetics identifies a different episodic logic through sustained work with key texts: “contagion, in The Federalist; error, in Franklin’s Autobiography; hesitation, in the novels of chapter 3; and volubility, in Salmagundi” (146). Throughout, Garrett’s readings are informed by his engagement with a wide-ranging cast of formal and political philosophers. Episodic Poetics opens with a discussion of Homeric epic and Aristotelian poetics, engages with Russian formalism, and grapples with the historicity of form as envisioned by Marxist theorists like Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson. The book’s theoretical commitments bear special mention because they mark its relatively unique relationship to ongoing debates about historicism and literary form. Episodic Poetics is part of the resurgence of new scholarship on aesthetics, but Marxist criticism has not been particularly popular in this work, which has tended to identify Marxism (via Jameson) with the mandates of historical contextualization. And yet, perhaps for this very reason, the book’s engagement with a range of older formalisms moves it toward a newly flexible, structural account of the form of politics.Siân Silyn Roberts’s Gothic Subjects treats the politics of literature—in this case, gothic literature—in relation to the singular unit of the people, the individual subject. Gothic Subjects builds on scholarship on the British gothic, which has examined the role the gothic played in establishing a “realist epistemological order . . . inhabited by characters whose desires and motivations arise solely within themselves” (3). Whereas British gothic literature briefly entertains the possibility of supernatural agency in order to “normaliz[e] and naturaliz[e] a modern subject defined by its autonomy” (3), American gothic literature, Roberts contends, turns away from an exceptionalist model of individual agency to formulate “workable models of social unity” (15). Roberts tempers the nationalistic tenor of this comparative claim by framing Gothic Subjects as a “diasporic” account of the transmutation of the literary conventions of the British gothic and the Lockean model of “the autonomous and self-enclosed individual” with which it has been associated (13).Despite its subtitle, Gothic Subjects is arguably less an account of the transformation of individualism than of its disappearance. Roberts reads the American gothic as “literary evidence” of the cultural development of fluid, changeable selves and collectivist imaginaries, which were “better suited to an early Atlantic world bound by the fluctuations of the market, immigration, accident, chance, circumstance, and opportunity” (4, 7). Gothic Subjects builds its argument through thematic readings of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown. Each chapter’s arguments hew closely to the overarching thesis, but Roberts’s textually grounded engagement with Enlightenment philosophy helpfully illuminates the philosophical stakes of the individual texts she examines. Roberts’s reading of Poe’s detective fiction is among the highlights. She situates the “hyperrationality” (97) of Poe’s detective fiction—and what she aptly characterizes as Dupin’s “uncommon sense” (96)—as “continuous” with an “Enlightenment model of identity” (103). In a similar manner, the conclusion briefly outlines some of the continuities between the American and British gothic. Gothic Subjects benefits from these qualifying claims, which unsettle the edges of its quasi-nationalistic thesis because, as Roberts acknowledges in her admirably circumspect introduction, arguments that hinge on comparative characterizations raise special evidential challenges.Roberts’s reexamination of the status of the individual in the US tradition raises a generative question: If, as she suggests in chapter 2, the captivity narrative offers a model of “social and somatic incorporation” that undercuts the Lockean conceit of self-possession and individual determination (70), when and how do models of exuberant collectivity delimit, rather than enable, desirable forms of political change? Geoff Hamilton’s The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature offers helpful information for contextualizing this and other questions. Hamilton’s study examines “autonomy’s evolution” in American literature from the founding era to the present. Hamilton tracks the historical development of autonomy by excavating the “affinities between American and Greek literary characters,” so that “we may see more clearly not merely what American literary history has in common with that of ancient Greece, but what is distinctively its own” (2–3). Hamilton’s focus on ancient Greek theories of autonomy sets his account apart from the more commonly discussed Anglo-American lineage of individualism. For this reason, though, the book’s contribution would have been further clarified by explicit engagement with Locke and the scholarship written in dialogue with liberal individualism.Although autonomy and individualism are often coupled together, Hamilton wants to leave individualism behind. He proffers the “tremendous historical and semantic richness” of autonomy as an alternative to the “blank quality of ‘individualism’” (9, 10). Hamilton’s concluding chapter is particularly engaging. It uses Don DeLillo’s writing to examine “the lingering, postmeridial undeath of personal autonomy.” In contemporary literature, Hamilton argues, the “augmentation of the self” is so great and “absolute” that any meaningful “sense of individuality” is destroyed (112). This image of an omnipresent but moribund individuality resonates with our own critical moment. Lockean individualism, it might be said, is itself in a state of undeath. These three studies attest to both a fatigue with individualism and its continued heuristic and conceptual value. Individualism continues to play a privileged—albeit negative—role in analyzing the historical development of early US literature, as well as its methodological horizons.

The Gothic played a considerable role in America's early literary nationalist campaign. At the forefront of this movement was the writer and social activist John Neal (1793–1876), who often used the prefaces to his Gothic novels to promote a literary nationalist agenda. Despite his censure of the tendency among his fellow American writers to import traditional British Gothic machinery into their fiction in the preface to his Gothic novel, The Down-Easters (1832), however, elements of this machinery are repeatedly discernible in Neal's own Gothic novels Logan (1823) and Randolph (1824). This article seeks to account for this discrepancy by proposing that the apparently counterintuitive slippage between the British and American Gothic traditions in Neal's writing performs a satirical function. Read in light of the preface to The Down-Easters, as well as the metafictional literary nationalist current which runs throughout much of Neal's corpus, the inclusion of a hackneyed British Gothic subplot in Logan's second volume and the jarring feudalization of Baltimore's architecture in Randolph emerge as a biting reductio ad absurdum of the impulse to transplant foreign generic hegemonies into the American literary context.

“Poor creature, trapped in existential solitude forever”: Gothic Dreams of the Uncanny, Repetition, Temporal Loops, and the Double in <em>The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina</em>

Gothic thrives on transgression: incest, rape, perversion, crime, insanity, and death are prominent themes within the Gothic tradition, which embodies an obsession with the darker side of human life. The recurrent violation of taboos represented in Gothic fiction is closely tied to its primary strategy of evoking terror and fear in the recipient. While one of the fundamental functions of taboos is to create a sense of security and social stability by means of excluding phenomena felt to be threatening along the axes of the sacred and profane and the pure and impure, the dialectical moment of transgression is at the same time constitutive for taboos (cf. Bataille). This paradoxical structure inherent to taboos helps to explain why we have the tendency to react with emotional ambivalence where taboos have been violated: we oscillate between fear and fascination, between “attraction and repulsion, worship and condemnation” (Punter 1996b, 190 with reference to Sigmund Freud), or, expressed in Gothic terms, we experience ‘dreadful pleasure’. It is due to its pronounced focus on taboo areas of socio-psychological life that the Gothic imagination tends to realize “(our ‘psychological’ fears... in very physical terms” (Morgan 6).

The essay focuses on the 1810 Gothic melodrama The Gordian Knot, or, Causes and Effects, by Charleston writer Isaac Harby (1788–1828). The play is loosely based on William-Henry Ireland's British Gothic novel The Abbess (1799), a tale of lust, violence, and persecution set in a Catholic convent and in the dungeons of the Inquisition. In the essay I argue that Harby's choices in adapting the novel are intriguing for what they suggest about the dilemmas of a Jewish writer in early nineteenth-century America. Harby, I show, invokes The Abbess but refuses to follow its lead when it comes to the Gothic demonization of religious difference. The essay examines the changes Harby institutes in his adaptation of the story vis-à-vis the similar forms of “othering” to which Jews and Catholics were subject in the early 1800s. I conclude by considering the resonance of Harby's background as Gothic novelist in his later role and rhetoric as a Jewish reformer.

Heroic images appear in ancient myths, legends, or folktales from almost every corner of the world. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung proposed the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes in the early 20th century, and his hero archetype has inspired numerous literary critics, mythologists, and writers to investigate the narrative structures of the hero’s journey. The 18th century witnessed a boom in British Gothic novels and Chinese supernatural tales, among which Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi are the most prominent. Both literary genres belong to supernatural fiction, with the hero being the typical character. Based on archetypal criticism and qualitative approaches like comparative method, historical approach, and textual analysis, this study attempts to compare the heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction, revealing the resemblance and diversity of human cultures through the analysis of the heroes’ characteristics and journeys in The Castle of Otranto and Liaozhai Zhiyi. The findings show that their heroic images are created by the hero archetypes from their national mythologies and social contexts, which demonstrates the transformation from the extraordinary to the ordinary.