Gothic Fiction Research Articles

Representation of Women in Gothic Literature: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Representation of Women in Gothic Literature: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

“Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots

Abstract In Paul Lynch’s neo-Victorian Famine novel Grace (2017), the protagonist’s encounter with the proverbial root of all evil marks a moment of Gothic horror. Much more threatening than a single dead body, the foul-smelling, rotten potato invokes the gigantic number of corpses the blight produced during the Irish Famine of the 1840 s. Rather than a natural disaster, this must be understood as a direct result of what is often broadly referred to as ‘ecological imperialism’. This article examines the ways in which Grace positions the Famine as both concrete reality and synecdoche of colonialism. The novel traces how the potato blight, caused by the pathogen oomycete Phytophthora infestans, transforms rural Ireland into an uninhabitable wasteland, populated by dehumanised creatures that are rendered disposable. In a second step, I consider the rotten potato as metaphorical of neo-Victorianism’s larger critical potential. As critics have argued, neo-Victorianism is well-suited to intervene in selective and largely nostalgic memorialisations of Britain’s imperial legacies. To do so, however, it must properly acknowledge that the soil on which it plants – the textualities, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools upon which it draws – is saturated with imperialist ideology to an extent that precludes any critical re-readings of the past and its bearing on the present.

Introduction: Disturbing the Sedimentations of Nineteenth-Century Environments

Abstract This research cluster offers four original case studies in Victorian and neo-Victorian ecocriticism. Clustered around the key concepts of form, materiality, and politics, its articles build on recent efforts by Victorianists to analyse interconnections of nature, agriculture, industry, and empire in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. The introduction first relates the cluster’s concerns to the latest scholarship in Victorian ecocriticism, and then turns to the aims and thematic focal points of the four contributions. The articles by Julia Ditter, Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Katharina Kalthoff, and Marlena Tronicke foreground the ecological project at the heart of a variety of fictional and nonfictional genres: the sensational novel, travel and nature writing, fantasy, and neo-Victorian gothic fiction. Ditter examines industrial travel narratives in the periodical press; Espinoza Garrido investigates the eco-colonial aesthetics of Florence Marryat’s sensation fiction; Kalthoff provides an ecofeminist reading of H. G. Wells’s mermaid tale The Sea Lady; and Tronicke examines material embodiments of the Irish Famine in the work of Paul Lynch. Together, these contributions offer fresh perspectives on the emerging field of Victorian ecocriticism and embrace the interdisciplinary dialogues facilitated by the environmental humanities for the study of nineteenthcentury literature and culture.

The Evolution of Gothic Literature :- From Medieval Times to Contemporary Culture

The Evolution of Gothic Literature :- From Medieval Times to Contemporary Culture

Gaskell Studies: Realism, Radicalism, and the Neoliberal Lens in Recent Scholarship on Elizabeth Gaskell

ABSTRACT Literary critics have long prized the works of Elizabeth Gaskell for their unflinching realism. They have found in her novels, in particular, artifacts of her era’s greatest injustices and the progressive spirit that animated resistance to them. In the last ten years, Gaskell scholarship has taken a different tack. Exploring her more formally radical narrative forms, including lesser-studied novellas like Lois the Witch and other Gothic tales, recent criticism has begun wrestling directly and indirectly with the concept of realism itself. Some scholars go so far as to suggest that realism as a literary critical rubric may be inadequate to the task of understanding and interpreting Gaskell’s most experimental and subversive works. This article furthermore argues that when we read for realism in Gaskell’s works, we run the risk of reading through a neoliberal lens that obscures key dimensions of her work and the social and political radicalism they espouse.

Remembering and forgetting in Sara Collins’ The confessions of Frannie Langton

Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Is Frannie trying to remember or to forget what happened? Why does Collins add strong gothic shades to her historical novel? How does she manipulate the historical whodunits of the crime in relation to Frannie’s memory? Why does Collins choose a lesbian relationship to feature the historical romance in the novel? The paper examines how a post-2000 historical novel manipulates its conventional subgenres by adhering to some and changing others, starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance in telling a neo-slave story.

Maternal slavery and Gothic melancholy in Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Vâlidem (My Mother) and Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics

AbstractLate Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

Enter Your Chambers and Shut Your Doors behind You: Bodily Containment, Proliferation, and the Right to Privacy in American Law and Gothic Horror

ABSTRACT: Landmark legal decisions on privacy and birth control reiterate gendered Cold War logics of containment by positioning the home as the safe container for female sexuality and fertility. Contemporary horror, however, counters this dualistic construction of safe interior–uncontrollable exterior by portraying the boundaries between inside and outside as artificial and porous. Representations of sexual containment, the nuclear family, and the domestic home space in The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963) and Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) complicate broader cultural and legal conceptions of birth control as a form of protection for the impenetrable marital home.

Frankenstein and the Science of Dreaming

ABSTRACT: Science fiction claims Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a progenitor on the basis of its extrapolation from speculations by Erasmus Darwin and others about the nature and origins of life. An equally strong narrative thread in the novel about extraordinary states of mind is usually taken as evidence of its grounding in supernatural and gothic fiction. The novel applies the same materialist assumptions and reasoned approach to dreaming, however, that it uses to explore biological science. Reading it in the context, first, of David Hartley's eighteenth-century Observations on Man and, second, of contemporary studies of the dreaming brain, we can see that Frankenstein is also science fiction of a different sort than usually supposed, a thought experiment about states of consciousness and unconsciousness and the strange experiences that arise from disrupting the boundary between sleep and waking.

Gender and the Disruption of Patriarchy in the Crime Stories of Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire

While Mariana Enríquez is most recognised as a writer of Gothic horror, this article explores issues of gender and power in crime stories from her collection Things We Lost in the Fire: ‘The Dirty Boy’, ‘Under the Black Water’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’. Enríquez aligns herself with feminist variants of the crime genre by centring women's concerns and voices, breaking down binary and hierarchical representations of gender and sexuality and illustrating the struggles women and marginalised groups face in Argentina under patriarchy. Discussed as well are the implications of Enríquez's feminist project in contemporary crime fiction.

Gothic Drift: The Case of ‘Raymond’ and ‘Arthur Kavanagh’

Two opposed views of the history of Gothic fiction claim that a) the genre went into decline and ‘died’ in the early nineteenth century, and b) it has gone from strength to strength into the twenty-first century. This article defends a third hypothesis: that Gothic neither died nor endured but transformed into other genres to which the term ‘Gothic’ can apply analogically at best. Leaning on formal criteria (the codes or compositional conventions of eighteenth-century Gothic) it then offers a comparison between two short narratives thirty-three years apart, which, while being essentially ‘the same’ text, yet can be shown to belong to different genres. The article then projects the notion of language drift onto literary evolution to suggest that a form of genre drift accounts for this seeming oddity.

The Anxiety of Gothic Kinship: Generic and Aesthetic Heterogeneity in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Novel The Devil’s Elixirs

In this paper I trace aesthetic and cultural-historical interactions between phenomena of the British Gothic literature and German Dark Romanticism in terms of cultural transfer. Focus of the study is the analysis of E. T. A. Hoffman’s novel The Devil’s Elixirs juxtaposed to Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk. Works by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Friedrich Schiller, Carl Grosse, and others outline their Gothic context. The analysis traces the interplay of the verbal, the fantastic and the visual codes in the two novels and their synaesthetic interlocking, characteristic of the German author. The comparison includes characters and plot, intertextual, generic, ethical, and other aspects in Hoffmann’s and Lewis’s novels. Along with the Gothic, elements of the Bildungsroman and the Trivialroman are highlighted in The Elixirs. Also the motive of the double and instances of metafiction are analyzed in it. Critical works by E. Blackall, L. Doležel, R. Godal, M. Foucault, T. Todorov, and others were applied in my writing.

Monstrous Mushrooms, Toxic Love and Queer Utopias in Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot

Embarking on a close reading of Jenny Hval's 2018 novel, Paradise Rot, this paper sets out to unveil the utopic potential rooted in reimagining the body not as a self-contained being but as an intricate network extending beyond the confines of the skin. It challenges prevailing Western epistemologies that isolate humans, hierarchically distancing them from non-humans such as plants and animals. By taking up the literary conventions of gothic horror, the analysis focuses on the peculiar, co-dependent relationship of Paradise Rot's central characters: Carral and Johanna. As the women’s unsettling love affair unfolds, they become a symbiotic and mycorrhizal entity akin to the sprouting mushrooms inhabiting their dilapidated house. Exploring the metaphorical and tangible challenges posed by mushrooms, the paper underscores the interconnected, non-singular nature of fungal networks. Hval provocatively links the queerness of her main characters with fungi, both typically demonized as alien, contaminating, and freakish. This paper furthermore aligns these characteristics with queered figures from classic gothic horror, including the lesbian vampire and Susan Stryker’s transgendered Frankenstein. Together, these monstrous entities disturb the boundaries between the “natural” and the supernatural, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead. Marxists have drawn comparisons between the vampire’s parasitic need to feed on blood and capitalism’s exploitation of labor. Through the character of Carral, who I read as a femme vamp figure, I argue that vampires have redemptive qualities that illuminate our fundamental dependence on others to survive. Hval's novel illustrates the essential, confronting fact that we need one another, and more so than ever in precarious times. In the context of the climate crisis, neoliberal individualism, and ongoing economic instability, understanding our indebtedness to one another and our environments is crucial for planetary survival. Ties of care in late capitalist societies are complex, messy, and unequal, yet by recognizing our reliance on one another, we might, as scholar Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) argues, realize a utopia where one’s dependence on others cannot, and need not, be concealed.

Enter the Luciferous Hexichasm: On the Savage Theoryfiction of Gruppo di Nun in Revolutionary Demonology

Theoryfiction: weird, reality-warping hybrid born of critical theory, esoterica, Qabala, cyberpunk and Gothic horror. More than mere academic auto-fiction or an intellectual strain of hysterical realism, theoryfiction deliberately attempts to actively infect and colonise the ‘real world’ with its own twisted vision: it is ambivalent in extremis towards the limitations of consensus reality, proving to be capable of incubating accelerationist philosophies and acting as a vehicle to reshape conscious reactions to culture simultaneously. In 1940, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius predicted the form; between 1997 and 2003, the experimental cultural theorist collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) brought it into being, only for English philosopher Nick Land to lead the group from a state of cyberfeminism to a growing neoreactionary cyberfascism.

The Gothic Pasts of Stranger Things

ABSTRACT Critical analysis of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things has largely emphasized its nostalgic engagement with 1980s Americana, and particularly that decade’s science fiction and horror films. However, trappings of the Gothic in Stranger Things do not merely align it with the twentieth century’s recent past; they also function in ways that demonstrate Stranger Things’ connection to the more distant past of the Romantic period’s Gothic novels. This article extends the Gothic inheritance of Stranger Things beyond 1980s’ science fiction horror to the Romantic Gothic novel’s investment in the found manuscript, the departure point for examining the use of Dungeons & Dragons in Stranger Things alongside Mary Shelley’s use of found manuscripts in Frankenstein and The Last Man. This article reads the found manuscript as a collaboratively produced parergon (a framing device sitting both inside and outside of the text), which works through acts of translation and recreation to bring the past to bear on the present. Through examining Stranger Things’ conceptual framing of its alternate dimension, the Upside Down, and the monstrous Demogorgon through Dungeons & Dragons, this article argues that Dungeons & Dragons functions in Stranger Things as a Gothic found manuscript, drawing literary and Gothic pasts into the show’s present.

Monster Ecologies: Material Eco-Rhapsody and the Bio-Gothic in Animal’s People

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People incorporates bio-gothic aesthetics to address the unprecedented ontological, perceptual, and political challenges presented by the Bhopal chemical disaster. Bio-gothic aesthetics refer to biological substrates to represent a “trans-corporeal” body (Alaimo), one enmeshed with a damaged environment, where disruptions to the ecosystem return to disturb the so-called normal behavior of the body. Sinha’s novel mobilizes a typical character from gothic fiction—the monster—to perform an embodied critique of neoliberal globalization. The bio-gothic monster reveals the body to be a site of universal (but unequal) precarity and risk, a surface of intervention for disciplinary power, and a node in a multi-species network of irruptive, improvisational resistance. By analyzing moments of material eco-rhapsody, in which drugs or other psychoactive chemicals enable Sinha’s narrator, Animal, to tap into an extrasensory beyond and channel a damaged-yet- resilient environment, I describe how the bio-gothic monster offers new ontological, phenomenological, and political formations capable of resisting neoliberal global amnesia. The bio-gothic monster serves as a site where the seemingly immaterial flows of global capitalism become fleshy and, therefore, as a key node for the formation of new, feral assemblages in the pursuit of postcolonial environmental justice.

The Psychology of Fear in H. P. Lovecraft's Gothic Fiction: A Reading of “The Rats In The Walls”

O gosto perceptível de Lovecraft pelo gótico produz peculiaridades que são apresentadas e discutidas, em termos das diferenças entre o gótico europeu tradicional e sua distinta versão americana. Lovecraft seleciona traços específicos do repertório gótico para despertar emoções primitivas e muitas vezes irracionais em seus leitores. Traços como o medo de ratos e o medo do escuro são discutidos dos pontos de vista psicológico e literário. O conto “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) é utilizado como objeto para confrontar tanto as características góticas quanto a exploração científica de fobias.

Hauntings in the Nursery: Reviving the Nursemaid Through Fin-de-Siècle Gothic

Abstract: This article examines the figure of the nursemaid in fin-desiècle Gothic literature and late-Victorian spiritualism. I locate the forgotten nursemaid in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) to establish the nursemaid as a maternal figure obscured by the popular domestic governess. Memoirs and supernatural stories which foreground the nursemaid by spiritualist and author Florence Marryat then serve as rich sources to discuss class and maternity in Britain and the colonies. By considering themes of loss and surrogacy that these nursemaid narratives explore, this article enriches understanding of both the Gothic and maternal identity at the fin de siècle.

Vránková, Kamila. Metamorphoses of the sublime: From Ballads and Gothic Novels to Contemporary Anglo-American Children’s Literature

Vránková, Kamila. Metamorphoses of the sublime: From Ballads and Gothic Novels to Contemporary Anglo-American Children’s Literature

‘Once you are in number 9 you are stuck in this space’: Constraint, Creativity and Inside No. 9

In this article, I will explore the ways in which the critically acclaimed British TV comedy anthology series Inside No. 9 (BBC Two, 2014–), created and written by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, uses constraints to facilitate creativity. While the generative properties of constraint have been explored by a wide range of scholars, their application to understanding the creative process in film and television has been limited, with studies of pedagogical approaches at the National Film School of Denmark and their influence on Danish cinema and television being the key example. While frequently described as ‘dark comedy’, Inside No. 9 embraces a wide range of subject matter and genre conventions, ranging from gothic horror to naturalistic drama. But the primary distinguishing characteristic of the show is that the self-contained stories are confined entirely or predominantly to a single location – frequently the No. 9 in question – and feature a limited cast. In addition to this foundational premise, the series embraces the generative properties of constraints in a rich variety of ways – including spatial, temporal, narrative and intertextual. This article will explore how these have functioned to create one of the most innovative and critically successful British TV shows of the last decade.