Gothic Fiction Research Articles

STRANGE STORIES FROM CHINESE STUDIOS AND GOTHIC LITERATURE

The ancient Chinese horror novel Strange Stories from Chinese Strange Studio vividly shows Chinese horror in front of the readers, which is a typical representative of Chinese horror literature. Gothic literature is a crucial literary genre of Western literature. Western research on Gothic literature is rich and detailed, and Gothic literature significantly impacts British and American literature. By studying their social and historical backgrounds, this paper will analyze their similarities and differences in scenes, characters, and writing characteristics and their development and influence on the Chinese and English academic circles.

Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States by Sara Austin Rhonda Brock-Servais (bio) Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States, by Sara Austin. The Ohio State UP, 2022. In a mere 150 pages of text, Sara Austin's book demonstrates how "the role of monster in children's culture, as objects of both fear and identification," has changed since the 1950s in the United States (1). The text includes an introduction, four chapters that proceed chronologically, and a conclusion. The author grounds her ideas in three texts: The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by Jack Halberstam, and "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Much of the Introduction is spent introducing the ideas of these thinkers: "Monstrous Youth takes Halberstam's, Cohen's, and Thomas's claims about monstrous bodies and the cultural connections between monsters and children as a foundation for the role of monsters in children's culture, specifically the cultural role that monsters assume when standing for certain types of child or adolescent bodies" (4). Austin moves on to differentiating her own thinking by explaining how this book extends the thinking of others "by exploring how the monster as a figure in gothic and horror texts becomes a metaphor for identity and difference within children's culture" (11–12). She then lays out three points that will be shown in variations throughout the chapters that follow: "Monster texts are used to frighten children by policing borders of identity, to instruct children on the preferred embodiment of their historical moment, and to present opportunities for child autonomy by excluding adults from the marketing and consumption of certain texts" (4). The introduction further details the author's choices with regard to structure, as well as the primary argument for each chapter and the cultural products that will be under examination; these include books (both chapter and picture) as well as comics, games, films, and toys. Moving into the body of the text, the reader knows exactly what to expect. Each chapter has [End Page 233] a number of subheadings, usually focused on a close examination of a cultural artifact. Chapter 1 centers on teen experience in the 1950s, using the concept of Enfreakment, a process detailed by disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: "Enfreakment works to separate the viewer from the exhibited, and to construct the viewer as a normal body through comparison [and] … is a necessary step in creating cultural as well as textual monsters" (19). The author expands the use of this term to include teen and child bodies that are othered or made threatening. The chapter uses EC Comics and American International Pictures (AIP) to demonstrate how fears of social change "led to adult attempts to suppress these materials in hope of preserving the status quo" (21). Ironically, this caused teens (and teen-centric narratives) to align themselves with the monster and created "one of the most potent symbols within youth culture" (21). The discussion of EC Comics foregrounds much that has already been said about the social panic of the 1950s and Fredric Wertham's The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and just how much of the appeal of horror comics came from how completely adults reviled them. This section puts together the comics and Enfreakment as follows: "using enfreakment as a means to draw in teen readers may have worked because this group felt largely out of place in early 1950s society, and the comics assured them that, even if they were a distinct class from children and adults, they were not, in fact, monsters" (28). Austin then focuses on juvenile delinquency and argues that the adult fear that young readers would align themselves with the monster of the comics resulted in "the adoption of the monster as a symbol of agency and defiance in children's and young adult culture" (30). The great irony here is that by positioning adolescents "as either vulnerable or grotesque," adults helped to create circumstances where the monster came to be a symbol of adolescent...

Siegel Spratford, Becky. (2021) The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, Third Edition. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2021, 182 p. $64.99 ($58.49 ALA members) ISBN: 978-0-8389-4876-7.

Becky Siegel Spratford’s third revised edition of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror is part of ALA Publishing’s Readers’ Advisory Series, which introduces librarians to various genres and associated media such as graphic novels, audiobooks, and more, to provide library users with horror genre resources. While the audience would be mostly public librarians, academic librarians may find this useful for several reasons. For instance, horror has academic value, and librarians who have a basis for recommending titles or horror subgenres such as gothic horror will help enhance student and faculty experience in their university libraries.

«ВТОРИННІ ДЖЕРЕЛА» КЕЛЬТСЬКОГО ТА ГЕРМАНО-СКАНДИНАВСЬКОГО МОДУСІВ В СУЧАСНІЙ ПОПУЛЯРНІЙ КУЛЬТУРІ ЧЕРЕЗ ПРИЗМУ ЖАНРУ ФЕНТЕЗІ

The article deals with the main sources of the modern fantasy genre, presented in the form of several blocks of borrowings. First of all, this is the influence of the figures of the «Celtic Revival», who were engaged the search, recording and systematization of mainly Irish, Scottish and Welsh tales, myths and a wide range of folklore material. This legacy was transformed into an original literary tradition characterized by a combination of legendary heritage with fictional art elements and authorial reworking. Examples of pseudo-translations from Celtic languages presented as authentic, such as the work of James Macpherson. The article identifies the key figures of the «Celtic Revival» and singles out their works, which, in the opinion of the author, had the greatest impact on the formation of the fantasy genre. In particular William Butler Yeats, Isabella Augusta Persse (usually Lady Gregory), Thomas Moore, Edward John Moreton Plunkett (usually Lord Dunsany), Irish writer, poet, painter – George Russell, Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore – John Millington Synge, Irish writer Alice Letitia Milligan. The Romantic Age in English literature had a significant impact on the fantasy genre. The author analyzed the most relevant creative developments in this connection: William Blake, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley. Gothic fiction and in particular Gothic novels, is an equally important «factor of influence». First of all, it is about Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker. The author presents a vision of the «wide treasury of inspiration» opus of the main archetypes of European fantasy, which also includes «German Romanticism». It is represented Ludwig von Arnim, Ernst Hoffmann, Ludwig Uhland, Friedrich von Hardenberg (usually Novalis), Ludwig Tieck, Joseph von Eichendorff.

Tracing Poe in short stories of Flannery O Connor

Flannery O'Connor was a Southern gothic writer, a subgenre of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, the father of Gothic fiction, contributed substantially to it. Many gothic elements of O'Connor are from Poe. These two writers have been from the same region. Her fiction does not include the exact writing style of Poe. Despite that, she has successfully used gothic elements slightly differently than he had and altered its elements in her writings. She has imbued mental and physical alienation, confinement, grotesque, macabre, and isolated places with a gothic motif in her short stories, 'The Life You Save May Be Your Own', 'Good Country People' and 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'. Her characters do not have supernatural elements in her selected short stories, but they are harmful and flawed. They elicit sympathy from the readers for their plight but do the opposite to their appearance. It adds grotesque, a gothic fiction sub-element. It makes her short stories compelling. Unlike Poe, her villain and evil characters usually do not directly kill. They try to mentally hurt the victims, as in the first two stories. The story revolves around the idea of alienation. While decaying and desolate surroundings create an isolated zone in Poe's writings, self-absorption is the primary cause of alienation in O'Connor's works. Swindling individuals’ entails macabre, such as confinement in O'Connor's stories. On the contrary, it is supernatural in Poe's work. In terms of location, the stories’ settings are similar. Alternatively, the story's primary storyline and climax are often confined inside a small area. Many of these elements are apparent in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. This paper will study how O’Connor has traced Poe in her selected short stories.

Готические составляющие генеалогии научной фантастики

Science fiction can be defined as the literature about cognizable unusual phenomena which represents hypothetical scientific, technical and social products of their rational exploration. Before the genre emerged, the subject of exploring the unusual was developed mainly in the field of mythological fiction, which became the basic element of Gothic literature. In Gothic, the features of science fiction began to form: in M. Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus”, the motives of the supernatural are rationalized through the use of scientific and technical issues. The goal of the presented research is detecting the nature, methods and specif­ics of the transformations of the Gothic plot that led to the formation of the science fiction genre. It is achieved by the use of comparative, historical-genetic, hermeneutic, mythopoetic methods. Gothic literature reacted to the growing interest in scientific and technological progress by attempting to rationalize the elements of the supernatural plot: demons, werewolves, the living dead could be presented either as a result of experimentation or as an object of scientific exploration. In Russian literature, V. F. Odoevsky made a move from Gothic poetics towards long-term social, scientific and technological forecasting in a fiction text. The role of Gothic in the genesis of science fiction is clearly visible in the artistic world of H. P. Lovecraft who elaborated supernatural horror in the form of nonhuman manifestations of the indifferent Universe. The protagonist scientist is involved into the knowledge of it and, therefore, is put in the situation of a mythological cultural hero, reinterpreted in the coordinates of the plot of scientific research.

Elements of Horror, Grotesque Bodies, and the Fragmentation of Identity in Mark Shelley’s Frankenstein

Gothic books emphasise the occult and the strange. Old buildings (especially castles or apartments with secret passageways), dungeons, or towers serve as the backdrop for the enigmatic events in Gothic literature. Obviously, ghost stories are a well-known form of Gothic fiction. In addition, distant locales that appear strange to the reader serve as part of the setting of a Gothic tale. Even the idea of resurrecting the dead is horrifying. Mark Shelley makes full use of this literary trick to heighten the eerie sentiments generated by Frankenstein in the reader. The idea of resurrecting the dead would have caused the typical reader to recoil in horror and unbelief.

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers Margarita Vaysman Bowers, Katherine. Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2022. 264 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Works cited. Index. $65.00. In the last decade, studies of the Russian Gothic have become a healthy subfield, with new publications appearing every year. This growth is spurred on by the development of the field at large: interdisciplinary Gothic studies are booming globally, with three research centres in the UK alone (in Manchester, Sheffield and Stirling) and a specialized Gothic Studies journal, published by Edinburgh University Press. But it is also thanks to studies like Bowers's that this once marginal topic is now an important component of both academic discussions and curricula specifically in Russian studies. Writing Fear urges us to rethink our assumptions about an intriguing and understudied aspect of nineteenth-century Russian realist writing: its relationship with popular literary genres, especially the Gothic. While isolated cases, like Fedor Dostoevskii's interest in sensationalist newspaper reports or Aleksandr Pushkin's Gothic parodies, are well-known, no study so far has charted a sustained timeline of Russian realism's engagement with Gothic literature and art. In keeping with other excellent recent nineteenth-century Russian Gothic studies, like Valeria Sobol's Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Ithaca, NY, 2020), Bowers's monograph focuses on both canonical and less well-known texts. Sophisticated close readings of the usual Gothic suspects like Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol´, Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevskii and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are accompanied by chapters on the once prominent but now almost forgotten authors like Evgeniia Tur, Evgenii Grebenka and Boris Savinkov. This unusually wide span, as well as Bowers's impressive command of both recent global theories of the Gothic and primary Russian sources, makes Writing Fear invaluable for anyone reading, [End Page 157] or writing, about Russian realism. This book makes bold but convincing theoretical claims, while retaining an accessible tone that does not take its readers' knowledge of the subject for granted. Bowers's main argument does not only concern the presence of Gothic elements in Russian realist fiction, the scale of which has previously been underappreciated even in the landmark studies on the subject. Importantly, she also explains why the Gothic — as style, narrative mode and set of tropes — was so important for Russian realists: it allowed them to depict 'transgression, trauma, or injustice', 'engaging readers on the deeply affective level through building up fear' (p. 10). Bowers uses the term 'Gothic realism' ('moments when authors writing in what we recognise as a realist style turn to gothic narrative devices, using the genre as a tool to articulate a facet of lived experience through the affective engagement of the reader', p. 10), to discuss a range of literary phenomena. The introductory chapter, 'Russian Realism and the Gothic', charts the evolution of this term from its first use in Mikhail Bakhtin's unpublished dissertation to recent scholarly re-appraisals of Russian realism. Part one, 'Gothic Migrations', focuses on 'the way Russian writers began using Gothic elements outside of Gothic works' (p. 12). Chapter one, 'A Russian Reader's Gothic Library', provides a long-awaited update on the themes first explored by Vadim Vatsuro. Chapter two, 'Gothic Transmutations in Pushkin and Gogol´', focuses on the Gothic 'aesthetic, authenticity and parody' (p. 12) in Evgenii Onegin (1825–32) and Dead Souls (1842), two texts that were 'deeply influential in the development of Russian realist poetics' (p. 12). Chapter three, 'Russian Landscapes in a Gothic Frame', compares the 'Gothic narrative frames' (p. 13) of Ivan Goncharov's 'Oblomov's Dream' (1849) and Turgenev's 'Bezhin Lea' (1851). Chapter four, 'The Idiot: Dostoevskii's Gothic Novel', explores the effect of the Gothic on Dostoevskii's experiments with the novelistic form. Part Two, 'Gothic Realism', 'illuminate[s] the function of the gothic as a formal innovation within literary realism' (p. 13). Chapter five, 'Physiological Petersburg, Gothic Petersburg', focuses on Gothic urban landscapes, and the way writers like Nikolai Nekrasov used Gothic tropes in a didactic way. Chapter six, 'Gothic Subjectivity and the Woman's Question', compares the use of marginalized...

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

Reading Oppression and Repression in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea

Annette and Antoinette were unwelcomed by all. They “were not in their (the white people’s) ranks” and “The Jamaican ladies never approved” (Rhys 3) of them. As Creoles, they had no root. Being of colour and not belonging to the prevalent binary structure, they never fit in. Neither the whites accepted nor the blacks. Throughout they were mistreated and suffered in the hands of both. While Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) represents the unfit monster in Bertha, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) re-presents the story leading to Bertha's present state. The journey from innocence to madness was forced onto the ‘monster’ of Bronte's Jane Eyre through various means and Rhys’ counter to the gothic romance provides an opportunity to re-read the disregarded characters in their ‘natural’ habitat, far from the cold and gloomy London. Their marginalization is realized through Rhys. The plot arouses the curiosity of the reader, illuminates the unheard story of the Creoles and brings into light the possible reasons for their ‘downfall’. This paper is an attempt to make an inquiry of the oppression faced by the ‘Others’, its impact on their psyche and the repression that led them to the doorstep of insanity. Through the means of a discursive study, it delves into the reasons for their degraded physical and mental state. The study employs the theoretical lens of Edward Said’s “Other” and Sigmund Freud’s “Trauma” to reach the desired analysis.

Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak (review)

Reviewed by: Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak Jessica R. McCort (bio) Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas, by Suzanne Manizza Roszak. U of Wales P, 2022. In Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas, Suzanne Manizza Roszak places at the center of her critical lens Gothic representations of childhood in texts representing a "broad range of multi-ethnic US, hemispheric American, and global literatures" (2). At its core, Roszak's book resists more traditional, Eurocentric narratives of Gothic childhood in the Americas that reinforced colonialist, imperialist, and white supremacist agendas and demonstrates how multi-ethnic US and hemispheric American writers have "refigure[d] uncanny youth in forms that have inverted these cultural scripts, using both the horrific injuries done to child and adolescent characters and their own subversive, resistive forms of Gothic power to disrupt the othering impulses of the Euro-American Gothic canon" (1). In doing so, Roszak builds upon efforts already made by other critics to disrupt Eurocentric studies and depictions of the Gothic, demonstrating that there is a "much more complicated history" of the genre that must account for a "complex and transnational constellation of origins" (1–2). In turn, Uncanny Youth encourages readers to broaden their understanding of the Gothic—particularly the way Gothic representations of childhood are read, taught, and discussed—and thereby opens further the critical examination of the hemispheric American Gothic to new and exciting directions for study, teaching, and research. Roszak's book is arranged into five chapters that approach Gothic youth from varying avenues, attending to representations of Gothic childhood and adolescence in literature for both youth and adult audiences. There have been studies in the last several years that operate in a similar vein, including books like The Gothic in Children's Literature: Haunting the Borders (2009), The Gothic Child (2013), Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture (2016), The Cultural [End Page 228] Construction of Monstrous Children: Essays on Anomalous Children from 1595 to the Present (2020), and Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves, Monstrous Others (2021). Roszak's unique contribution, however, is to concentrate specifically on Gothic representations of childhood in the literary Americas that have been overlooked in other studies and to argue that critics must pay more attention to the revolutionary power of Gothic youth in texts by authors who seek to challenge various forms of oppression and violence. As Roszak notes in her introduction, the book focuses primarily on how, "[i]n the modern and contemporary hemispheric American Gothic, stories of childhood and adolescence emerge as a literary way toward scrutinizing intersectional currents of social injustice that violently threaten young people and the communities that surround them" (3). However, Roszak is also careful to attend to the ways in which "Gothic youth also simultaneously functions as a site of resistance, highlighting the subversive potential of childhood to dismantle imperialist ideologies and the systems they uphold" (9). In this, Roszak's work is reminiscent of the efforts of scholars in such fields as girlhood studies who have tried to recognize the ways in which children have both manipulated and been manipulated by the structures of power that seek to mold and contain them. Following an introduction that sets up the book's theoretical foundations and lays out its argumentative framework, Roszak focuses first on authors' imposition of "perennial girlhood" on female characters as a rhetorical device designed to demonstrate political and cultural oppression. In this first chapter, Roszak contrasts the landmark Gothic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) with Octavio Paz's La Hija de Rappaccini (1953) and Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête (1969). As Roszak notes in the book's introduction, many of the authors she addresses "are united by their participation in projects of literary, historical, and sociocultural rewriting. Many of their books are close re-envisionings of canonical texts" (7). This is especially the case in the first few chapters of Uncanny Youth, in which Roszak concentrates on authors grappling with canonically entrenched writers like Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Emily Brontë. Furthermore, Roszak also argues for the importance of reconsidering as...

Technologies of Contagion: Spores, Viruses, and the Queer Pleasures of Apocalypse

This essay theorizes the apocalyptic in three recent Latina gothic fictions. Zombie mushrooms are at the heart of the Doyle family heteropatriarchal colonial enterprise in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. The rabies virus is weaponized as a justification for militarized control of East LA—and in particular over the bodies of young Chicanas—at the height of the Chicano Movement in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them. A viral apocalypse drives Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory” forward across sexual and other forms of queer intimacy, leaving the narrator to wonder whether the world will spin faster without people on it. While in each of these instances tropes of contagion represent a threat against human life, viruses and mushrooms are also perfect articulations of liminality—neither clearly animal nor plant, troubling taxonomic common sense, threatening contagion and annihilation. They are biological analogues to both the wild and emancipatory queer and Chicana feminist borderlands imagined by poets and scholars alike, and this essay speculates on their theoretical possibilities as tropes of destruction and creation. The viral and the fungal represent a biotechnology of transformation that decenters liberal humanism and promises moments of apocalyptic emergence of a queer, Latina utopia.

“History Digs a Shallow Grave”: Queer Temporality in Emily M. Danforth’s Lesbian Gothic

ABSTRACT: Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) revels in the disruption of time through erotic physicality. Because the Gothic and the queer break the bounds of normative constructions of time, the horror of Plain Bad Heroines arrives in the effect that queer Gothic time has on queer bodies by allowing them to delight in rejecting linearity while they run the risk of destabilizing their identities as they encounter the past. This article demonstrates that such disruption is particularly prevalent in neo-Victorian lesbian Gothic fiction by reading the novel through Freeman’s (2010) concept of erotohistoriography in two ways: first, by focusing on the way queer time effects and facilitates queer embodiment through the setting(s). Second, Gothic doubling is both an erotic and disorderly element of queer time’s effect on the lesbian body in Plain Bad Heroines . Temporal collapse allows the characters to encounter each other and the past, but with dire consequences.

카를로스 루이스 사폰의 『안개의 왕자』의 현대적 의미

The cultural logic of the contemporary century is skeptical of absolute ideology or belief in reproduction and seeks familiarity and diversity. The popular genre that the public enjoys is not a crisis, but rather makes the genre more rich. Modern society’s norms, life, daily life, and social system kept the illusion of a dark place behind memories and consciousness in the periphery, but The Prince of Mist introduces new areas lying just beneath the surface of civilized life into the novel genre. As a reaction to everyday things through supernatural events, the obsessive and impulsive flow of fear and twisted desire is the novel’s main theme. The novel has gained huge popularity as a fun and entertaining story with supernatural elements and romance. It is loved beyond the sarcasm of the past Gothic novel style. We talk lightly about social criticism, but inside it tells the story of our desire and the cultural spirit. It also transforms the typical structure of gothic novels to show aspects that criticize the typical modern spirit of reason and rationality. On the other hand, the novel also serves to enrich the dilapidated imagination in which most social practices are achieved by technical and practical values. This is because there are all kinds of things in the infinite universe that cannot be solved by human knowledge. It is also said that it is a world full of chaos and unknown uncertainty, such as a watch going backwards or a sculpture park full of mysteries and magical events.

Walled up alive: The Uncanny and Gender haunted spaces in Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House

Gothic literature is frequented by haunted texts particularly outlining a ruinous spatial relationship between the female and the haunted spaces. Using Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House as primary text, this paper studies how haunting spaces, underlying anxieties, and prejudices against women manifest the dark atmosphere that threatens and eventually engulfs the female. Chapter by chapter, the spatial hauntings are coupled with supporting ideas of the uncanny. The article explores how the uncanny exhibits itself in a haunted space and how gender is connected to suppressed fears in women. The conclusion drawn lays emphasis on the recognition of reasons backing gendered hauntings and how women extract fears from their repressed past and embed them within domestic borders. Though the hauntings that happen around women are not untrue, this article argues how women are more likely to suffer from hauntings due to repressed traumas and fears.

Vampires and Infection in Croatian Literature

Vampire characters in Croatian literature are a rare and marginal occurrence within fantastic Gothic literature, and their main task is to undermine the existing social order. Since the late 17th century, vampires were part of folklore writings and archive documents in which they were an explanation for the spread of infectious diseases and unexplainable epidemics, while from Romanticism onwards, they moved to literature in which they became metaphors for familial violence, mental and physical illnesses of individuals and of society as a whole. The author analyses vampire characters and vampirism as presented in popular novels by Boris Perić and Robert Naprta. In these novels, vampires function as multi-layered metaphors related to, inter alia, war traumas. Both novels feature characters of doctors, and the writers mostly use them to criticise corruption in and disadvantages of the health system. In Naprta’s case, real-life Croatian scientists Ivan Đikić and Miroslav Radman are parodied, which gives a touch of contemporaneity to those novels. The final gallery of vampire characters includes those from the novel written by Milena Benini.

Przeszłość i teraźniejszość, czyli sposób, w jaki Peter Ackroyd gra z gotykiem w powieści "Mr Cadmus"

The aim of this article is to distinguish Gothic fiction conventions which Peter Ackroyd uses in Mr Cadmus (2020) in order to present English national identity juxtaposed with cultural otherness. Using parody, Ackroyd ridicules irrational fears commonly associated with immigrants and, simultaneously, outlines their role in building English national identity in the past and the present. Drawing on theories of the Gothic as an expression of cultural anxieties, this article seeks to demonstrate that Mr Cadmus can be perceived as fictional dramatisation of the ideas Ackroyd puts forward in his non-fiction – “the English genius” (2002) in particular.

"Why must fireflies die so young?" The Picturesque of Caution in the Works of Studio Ghibli

As opposed to most contemporary usage of the word “picturesque” – which is generally taken to mean visually attractive in a quaint or charming way, or else something that resembles a picture – William Gilpin introduced this term to the English cultural debate in 1792. Gilpin used “picturesque” to typify an aesthetic ideal wherein roughness, raggedness, and ruins would be privileged over smoothness, symmetry and perfection. Over time, his conceptualization of “the picturesque” led to a celebration of disorder, decay, and ruin, a kind of glorification of violence also familiar to the Gothic romances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, following the unimaginable havoc and mass destruction caused by the two world wars, ruins and images of ruins started to be viewed very differently. This paper seeks to explore how the picturesque mode has been used as an instrument of caution in the works of Studio Ghibli, spearheaded by two creative artists and directors, Hayao Miyazaki and Takahata Isao, who have experienced the horrors of WWII firsthand in their own childhoods. This paper specifically looks at two famous anime feature films produced by Studio Ghibli – Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004) – that deal with the impacts of war and convey strong anti-war messages by uniquely employing the picturesque mode of representation.

The haunting power of dreamscapes within Tim Winton’s gothic novella In the Winter Dark

Nightmares and their aesthetics of terror have been linked to Gothic literature since the birth of the genre during the pre-Romantic era. Indeed, many early authors of the form, including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, were driven to articulate the content of disturbing dreams via their literary work. Significantly, dark literary dream sequences continue to be a cornerstone feature of many contemporary Gothic texts. In this paper, I reflect upon some of the uniquely Australian Gothic tropes on display within Tim Winton’s 1988 novella, In the Winter Dark, while also discussing the various functions performed by dreamscapes within this work. In addition, and with occasional reference to Freudian concepts, I explore the use of Winton’s nightmare sequences to re-present, in recurring fashion, the fragmented sense of self to which his protagonists are subject as they struggle to recover from traumatic events (or not recover, as the case may be). Finally, I discuss the capacity of dreamscapes within this novella to contribute to narrational and structural strategies in ways that are aesthetically powerful and innovative.

Marquis de Sade, The Marquise de Gange. Translated with an Introduction and notes by Will McMorran

This edition retrieves Sade’s late novel from the deep shadow of his pornographic production and places it squarely within the gothic canon. In so doing, it pursues a line also productively explored by Philippe Roger in his essay on Sade and the gothic in John D. Lyons’s collection The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales (Newark: ­University of Delaware Press, 2019; reviewed in FS, 75 (2021), 405–06). Will McMorran’s excellent Introduction dramatically retells the story of the notorious true crime in which a Provençal noblewoman was murdered by her husband’s brothers in 1667, showing where Sade’s tale fits within the many accounts of her death. He also provides a very helpful selected bibliography of the retellings of the story, of which there are many from both before and after Sade, most recently in 1984, supplying in its fascinating entirety an English translation from 1744 of François Gayot de Pitaval’s influential version. ­Notable (re-)writers include Charlotte Smith, Alexandre Dumas père, and Elizabeth Gaskell. ­McMorran’s argument is two-pronged: firstly, that this novel is not of lesser importance to Sadean studies than the earlier works, and here he joins other recent scholars looking to rehabilitate the late novels (notably Michèle Vallenthini’s Sade dans l’histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019)). His second goal is to establish Sade as a properly gothic author, influenced both by the English gothic and by what might be seen as the genre’s origins in the Histoires tragiques tradition. And the result, in McMorran’s view, is that with The Marquise de Gange ‘the Gothic is coming home’ (p. xxv). So, what of the novel itself? Castles, dank rooms, fell premonitions, and a beautiful heroine unfairly treated are all abundantly present. The reader familiar with Sade will also recognize the disquisitions on nature and won’t be too surprised to discover that the ‘dissolute’ man is ‘inflamed rather than soothed’ by the beautiful ‘apologist for virtue’ (p. 90). There are some bravura passages of gothic horror and in one such we find the Marquise espying a hidden door: ‘a spluttering lamp reveals a glimpse of a chamber on the other side of the door; she enters… But what hideous object greets her eyes! There on a table before her, she sees an open cadaver, almost entirely ripped asunder’ (p. 130, punctuation sic). She escapes for the time being, yet ‘tottering, buffeted both by the gale and her own terror, [she] resembles a young willow battered by a storm’ (p. 131). Poor woman! Her horrid fate will not be eluded. In amongst all this turbulence, the (­relatively) sober account (p. 80) of what it’s like to be imprisoned adds depth and feeling, and if I can’t agree with McMorran that The Marquise de Gange offers a ‘taut, tense narrative’ (p. xxvii), he is right that this is a text worth revisiting and which should be part of a fuller sense of the gothic canon, on both sides of the English Channel.