Gothic Genre Research Articles

Beyond Frankenstein: the Politics of the Gothic in Iraqi Fiction

Abstract This article examines works of post-2003 Iraqi fiction that draw on the aesthetic and thematic conventions of the postcolonial gothic genre by centering the grotesque figure of the animated corpse. Through these figures, the texts bring the disposable victims of necropolitical violence back into view, resisting their erasure while also resurrecting the buried histories that contributed to the outbreak of ongoing conflict. As these texts foreground the victims of violence both past and present, they issue powerful critiques of neocolonial and sectarian violence, particularly through their inversion of the gothic trope of the terrifying Other. In these texts, initially frightening animated corpses are revealed to be the sympathetic victims of violence, rendering necropolitical violence, rather than the corpses, the true source of horror in the texts and issuing a call to the reader to sympathize and even empathize with the frightening Other.

Patchwork Gothic in Polish Vampire Films

The article explores the emergence of Gothic elements in Polish cinema, specifically in the realm of vampire films. Despite the Polish literary market being saturated with horror, Polish cinema has conspicuously shied away from the genre for decades. However, the popularity of Hollywood Gothic cinema has influenced the once-hermetic Polish film industry, leading to the inclusion of classic Gothic themes, characters, and visuals in Polish vampire films. The article delves into the history of Polish horror cinema, and its relation to Hollywood Gothic cinema, whilst focusing on the vampire aspect of horror. In addition, it highlights the concept of “patchwork Gothic”, which involves blending elements of western and Slavic cultures, aesthetics and characters. By analysing two Polish vampire films, I Like Bats (1985) and The Lullaby (2010), in reference to the notion of patchwork Gothic, the author argues that the combination of disparate cultural influences creates a unique and dynamic interpretation of the Gothic genre in Polish cinema.

From Monster to Man: The Transformation of the Vampire and the Gothic Heroine in Dracula and Vampire Diaries

Bram Stoker's Dracula and L. J. Smith's Vampire Diaries: The Awakening, separated by a century, both feature the iconic vampire. This study explores how the characterization of the vampire, and its impact on female characters, has transformed within the gothic genre. Utilizing Jungian Archetype theory and textual analysis, this study examines the evolving portrayal of the vampire figure and its connection to the representation of women's horror and madness in the gothic narratives. The analysis reveals a shift in the vampire archetype from Dracula's monstrous and predatory figure to a more romanticized and conflicted one in Vampire Diaries: The Awakening. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates how female characters' experiences of horror and madness transition from fear of the vampire in Dracula to a more complex interplay of fear and desire in Vampire Diaries: The Awakening.

The Gothic Genre and Indigenous Fiction: A Reading of Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes

The Gothic Genre and Indigenous Fiction: A Reading of Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes

Gothic Experiences in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This paper thoroughly analyses the theme of the gothic imagination in the works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, specifically in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The novels portray romantic and sublime scenes with elements of terror, horror, and the uncanny, which intensify the expression of the gothic feelings experienced by the characters. The study also explores women's suffering in the context of gothic thought. Various factors inherent to the gothic genre contribute to the 19th-century readers’ fascination with the supernatural and thrilling emotions. This work explores gothic experiences depicted in novels using gothic tropes and critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism, or psychoanalysis. The use of the framing narrative technique remains a distinctive aspect of this study which worthily includes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that many critics have wrongly overlooked when interpreting the Bronte sisters’ novels in the light of the gothic trend. The analysis considers the common gothic features that characterize the novels, rather than treating them separately. This reinforces and enhances the scope of the analysis of the Gothic vision of these Victorian novelists.

Gothic Experiences in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This paper thoroughly analyses the theme of the gothic imagination in the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, specifically in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The novels portray romantic and sublime scenes with elements of terror, horror, and the uncanny, which contribute to the gothic feelings experienced by the characters. The study also explores women's suffering in the context of gothic thought. Various factors inherent to the gothic genre actually contribute to the 19th century readers’ fascination with the supernatural and thrilling emotions. This work explores gothic experiences depicted in novels using gothic tropes and critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism, or psychoanalysis. The use of the framing narrative technique remains a distinctive aspect of this study which worthily includes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that many critics have wrongly overlooked when interpreting the Bronte sisters’ novels in the light of the gothic trend. The analysis considers the common gothic features that characterise the novels, rather than treating them separately. This reinforces and enhances the scope of the analysis of the Gothic vision of these Victorian novelists.

NEW CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON EXISTENTIAL AND SOCIAL UNDERCURRENTS IN BRITISH GOTHIC NOVELS

Changes that occur often in the world around us in accordance with each period’s change. It is a common trend in writing to introduce new tendencies, and the Gothic subgenre exhibits this tendency. The term Gothic has its roots in the early 16th century and refers to a mysterious quality that appears in some metaphysical items. This paper is a humble attempt to explore the history of the Gothic novel and demonstrate how mystery alone recreates this genre in British literature. The ability of intangible components to incite fear in readers was lessened with the rise of the mysterious portrayal of a story in day-to-day life. As the Gothic novel began to examine reality, readers’ desire to learn the truth increased. This paper investigates to understand the reasons for the abrupt disappearance of metaphysical components and increased focus and importance on existential and social issues by examining a few randomly chosen modern novels and comparing them to the earlier Gothic classics. It highlights the differences occurring in readers’ views according to the various times while also evaluating the variance occurring within the Gothic genre.

Twilight: Is it Goth Enough? - An Analysis of the Popular Vampire Fiction Movies and their Relevance to the Gothic Genre

Twilight: Is it Goth Enough? - An Analysis of the Popular Vampire Fiction Movies and their Relevance to the Gothic Genre

The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the Merveilleux Louisianais

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale.

Archive, Intertextuality and Genre in Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021)

This article reads Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021) as a novel of racial terror that is both about the reading and interpreting of an archive of this violence and, in some senses, formally archival, too. Drawing on Theodore Martin’s theory of the “drag of genre” and “drift of the contemporary,” we consider the ways Everett’s novel modulates through different generic modes while critiquing and disrupting the ideological currents that move within them and normalize violence via generic conventionality. In The Trees, an extensive set of allusions complement the inherent intertextuality of the crime and gothic genres to form an archive which is further constituted by a literal (fictional) archive at the heart of the novel. This archive, kept by an elderly root doctor, features “almost everything ever written about every lynching in these United States of America since 1913” (103). From this point we draw on Saidiya Hartman’s and Toni Morrison’s critiques of the archives of slavery and an American literary archive, respectively, locating Everett’s project as a timely intervention that rightly positions state and state-sponsored terrorism at the heart of America’s history.

The Problem of Gothic in the Storytelling of Madina Omarova

This article examines the problem of the Gothic in contemporary storytelling of the writer Madina Omarova. Let's imagine that the Gothic style characteristic of Western literature, reflected in the Kazakh prose with an original Kazakh coloring and in the context of synthesis, are analyzed and presented as an ongoing study, building on previous research. To reveal the topic, we use the methodology of modern Kazakh literary studies aimed at studying the author and the methodology of studying mythological-critical hermeneutics, the literary process in the national and international framework. We studied and used the theoretical justification of this problem in the works of Kazakh, Russian, and English literary critics. The initiative of this question was analyzed in the Kazakh literary studies in the article «Gothic expressions in modern Kazakh prose» by Adil Zhakulaev. This was followed by some discussions and work on a project studied on the basis of a grant. Nevertheless, according to the stories of the writer Madina Omarova, we consider it necessary to study the Neo-Gothic style and its artistic activity. Mystical directions, branches of psychologism in traditional Kazakh stories began to be studied in a new way. Therefore, the identification of the Gothic style, its artistic manner through the stories of the writer Madina Omarova becomes the task of the article. This is due to the fact that in Kazakh society the foundations of otherworldly power, negative illusions, mysterious destinies that give the genre character of the gothic are mystically familiar from oral literature. But the embodiment in this gothic style of the struggle between the heroes of the new time reflects the ability of the writer and the new direction in Kazakh literature. From the stories of the writer M. Omarova analyzes the artistic evolution of the gothic genre. The poetic nature is analyzed, the aspiration for the location is expressed. The work on revealing the passive and active element of the gothic in the artistic aspect of the Kazakh narrative is carried out. The process of intertwining elements of gothic and science fiction in the modern Kazakh storytelling is considered.

Chronotope problem in gothic works

It is known that Gothic literature had previously become the object of study of many writers. The history of the formation and stages of the development of Gothic literature and plot specifics, chronotope, the way of transmitting characters and the system of motives, etc. were considered as an urgent problem of the study. Although the manifestation of Gothic elements was considered in English, European, Russian literature, the picture of the Gothic genre in Kazakh literature has not yet been considered to the fullest extent. In the works of writers of the period of independence, D. Kostolin, K. Mubarak, M. Omarova, M. Malik, A. Adilbek, national codes that reproduce our national knowledge, the suffix of folklore forgotten today, shaking consciousness are set forth. We analyze the works of the authors based on a small plot, a national worldview based on a new form, a formal search. The method of transmitting the Gothic style was analyzed, including the authors' consideration of the chronotopic situation. New practices of writers in providing time and space are considered.

Representations of Terror and Horror in the Frontispieces to Thomas and Robert Hughes’s Gothic Chapbooks

ABSTRACT Chapbooks are versatile print media that, more than any other print form, made available a wide variety of texts intended for popular reading to a broad and diverse readership. Gothic chapbooks or bluebooks, in particular, occupied an intermediary position between expensive editions of belles lettres and cheaply produced ballads and other literary ephemera. Adapting and appropriating genre conventions and narrative strategies, they both capitalised on and further contributed to the popularity of the Gothic genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To date, however, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the frontispiece illustrations included in these chapbooks. This article examines the frontispieces to the Gothic bluebooks issued by Thomas and Robert Hughes in 1807 and 1808. Exploring the multifunctionality of the illustrations, it explores the ways in which they developed visual interpretations of Gothic horror and terror, generated metageneric reflections, and participated in a visual culture shared across different media networks. Functioning as a critical access point for readers, the frontispieces represented an integral part of the paratextual framing of the bluebook texts, generating meaning and affecting the Gothic reading experience.

“It made her age hard to guess”: Narrating the dynamics of aging and gender through Victorian Gothic archetypes in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black

Abstract Although Susan Hill has become a prolific writer of ghost narratives in the last decades, it was at a particularly momentous stage of her life as a woman writer that she published The Woman in Black (1983), which is considered her first ghost novel. Evoking the Victorian past, The Woman in Black engages intertextually with Victorian novels within the Gothic genre. The character of the Woman in Black comprises features pertaining to different Victorian Gothic archetypes, such as the ghost, the vampire, and the double. Some of the traits pertaining to these literary archetypes echoed Victorian anxieties about aging that are recovered and reinterpreted in Hill’s novel. Furthermore, in analogy with a Gothic romance, the encounter between the narrator as a young man, Arthur Kipps, and a spectral aging woman, the Woman in Black, unleashes the hero’s process of coming of age, which he recollects in his old age as he is writing his narrative. Narratological features pertaining to the Gothic genre, like the use of a frame narrative that blends past and present, underscore the dynamics of aging, since processes of interrupted aging and premature aging disrupt the boundaries that conventionally distinguish life stages. This article approaches Hill’s The Woman in Black as a contemporary ghost novel that evokes and subverts Victorian discourses of aging and gender, at the same time that, from a contemporary perspective, it vindicates the figure of the Victorian fallen woman as an aging mother.

Gender, Genre and the Female Gothic: Resisting Patriarchal Norms in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

The female gothic reinterprets works by female authors by fusing feminism and the study of gothic literature. In actuality, it represents a significant advancement in the study of gender in Gothic literature. In works written in the gothic style by women, the oppression of women in patriarchal society is reflected, and the destruction of women at the hands of patriarchy is emphasized throughout gothic art; in this sense, the resilience of the female gothic protagonists in the face of adversity symbolizes their maturation as women. Based on this context, this research attempts to compare "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter with "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from the standpoint of the feminine Gothic fiction. The dark tragedies that await women in patriarchal culture are explored by Carter and Gilman in ways that transcend beyond the normal boundaries of the gothic genre. By contrasting the narratives, this study aims to show how women begin to question and even demolish patriarchal chauvinism and move away from their subservient position in patriarchal society.

The magic lantern as a Gothic literary instrument

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the function of the magic lantern, a seventeenth-century scientific invention with the ability to project frightening images painted on transparent slides, as a literary device intrinsically connected to the Gothic genre. Darkness, foul weather, animated portraits, eerie apparitions, crumbling abbeys and half-demolished tombs team with physics and optics in an intricate swirl of exchanges between literature and visual technology, still relevant today. These exchanges are vividly illustrated in Girona’s spectacular Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol.

The Stepford Wives, Or: The Horrors of Domesticity

ABSTRACT This paper provides a new interpretation of Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives (1972). It seeks to refute that the novel “misses the deeper concerns over the wage relations making the antagonism between Joanna and her husband inevitable” (Brady 2021, 9) and that its ambivalent ending is “part of a canny strategy” (Neill 2018, 265) to win as large a readership as possible. I will show that female economic dependence is in fact the key issue of The Stepford Wives. Moreover, I draw on the novel’s roots in the Gothic genre to demonstrate that its ambivalence entails an insightful commentary on the pervasiveness of patriarchy. Levin’s novel illustrates that the fight for women’s rights is challenged on multiple levels, neither solely nor exclusively by men, but rather by a whole (patriarchal) culture. Gender equality hence requires that both men and women critically reflect on their own role in sustaining patriarchy. The Stepford Wives therefore paints a more complex picture of the “war between the sexes” than its conventional reading allows.

Feminist Gothic: Anonymity and intersectionality of oppression in Eva Figes'sThe Tenancy

AbstractThe Gothic genre has historically been adopted by women writers to express their subversive gender views. InThe Tenancy, Figes depicts the systematic oppression of the patriarchal society against women during the latter half of the twentieth century. She also revises the traditional Gothic topos of “oppression” in terms of three aspects: victim, intersectionality, and the source of oppression. Female victims no longer hold traditional gender values; they are new women who are oppressed for their nonconformity. This novel also shows that, with the development of technology and urbanization, patriarchal oppression has become more anonymous and more systematic, during which process gender and class parameters intersect with each other. Figes's revision upon the “oppression” topos reveals a more revolutionary insight than most Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a result,The Tenancymarks a significant transition from the female Gothic to the feminist Gothic.

The Art of Gothic Literature: An Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

This article examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an example of Gothic literature. The author analyzes the novel's themes, characters, and literary devices to explore how Shelley uses Gothic elements to create a complex and emotionally resonant work. The article also delves into the historical and cultural context in which the novel was written, highlighting the influence of Romanticism and Enlightenment philosophy. Ultimately, the article argues that Frankenstein is a masterpiece of Gothic literature that continues to captivate readers and inspire new interpretations. In "The Art of Gothic Literature: An Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," the author examines Shelley's famous novel and its contribution to the Gothic literary tradition. The article explores the novel's themes, including the dangers of scientific progress, the limits of human knowledge, and the consequences of playing god. The author also analyzes the novel's structure, characterization, and use of symbolism, highlighting the ways in which Shelley draws upon Gothic conventions while also subverting them. Ultimately, the article argues that Frankenstein remains a powerful and influential work of Gothic literature that continues to captivate readers more than two centuries after its publication. This article analyzes Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" through the lens of gothic literature. The author explores how Shelley incorporates various gothic elements such as supernatural occurrences, grotesque imagery, and emotional intensity to create a dark and unsettling atmosphere. The article also delves into the themes of the novel, including the dangers of playing god and the isolation and alienation experienced by the creature. Through a close reading of the text, the author highlights the literary techniques that Shelley employs to convey these themes and to create a timeless work of gothic literature. Ultimately, the article argues that "Frankenstein" remains a relevant and powerful example of the gothic genre due to its ability to evoke fear, explore complex themes, and showcase the artistry of its author.

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution