Gothic Genre Research Articles

“Horror More Horrible From Being Vague, and Terror More Terrible From Ambiguity”

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe famously depicts the emergence of confined bodies in excessive or grotesque ways, as both living and dead bodies physically come out of graves, walls, and other forms of entombment in a variety of his tales. These failed confinements that do not successfully contain the entombed continue in later Gothic literature. Poe's “Berenice” (1835) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Giant Wistaria” (1891) both depict buried bodies reemerging from graves. In these works, the line between dead and alive becomes skewed as the grave, the appropriate space for a dead body, is occupied by something still living or otherwise unsettled. Manipulating the Gothic trope of confinement, Poe and Gilman place undead characters in liminal spaces where they exist between two clear, defined states. In these confined spaces, characters hover between sanity and insanity, reality and fantasy, childhood innocence and adulthood sexuality, or life and death while attempting to navigate their own changing identities. Examining the liminal nature of characters in these two works provides a framework for better understanding how ambiguity and uncertainty serve a crucial role in the Gothic genre. Additionally, exploring connections between these two authors contributes to understandings of Poe's and Gilman's relationship and connections between their Gothic works.

SCREENING THE GOTHIC: PARODY OF THE GOTHIC GENRE IN TIM BURTON’S DARK SHADOWS

Since the first Gothic work, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, was published in 1764, the Gothic genre has constantly been changing and evolving. One of its main purposes has always been social criticism, and therefore Gothic literature had to change together with the society. In the 20th and especially in the 21st century with the arrival of new technologies, Gothic moved from the paper to the screen. Film and television offered a whole new range of possibilities for the postmodern authors of Gothic works to express themselves. One such artist is certainly the American director Tim Burton who is famous for his dark comedies that are almost exclusively crammed with Gothic elements. In this paper, the author shows how, in his movie Dark Shadows from 2012, Tim Burton used parody as a tool to make an on-screen pastiche of Gothic elements packed in a dark comedy for the true lovers of the Gothic genre, creating a genuine example of the postmodern Gothic.

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

“Weird Melancholy” and the Modern Television Outback: Rage, Shame, and Violence in Wake in Fright and Mystery Road

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a 'Weird Melancholy' (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.

Présence du roman gothique anglais dans les premiers romans de George Sand by Marilyn Mallia

Reviewed by: Présence du roman gothique anglais dans les premiers romans de George Sand by Marilyn Mallia Tessa Nunn Mallia, Marilyn. Présence du roman gothique anglais dans les premiers romans de George Sand. Classiques Garnier, 2018. Pp 281. ISBN: 978-2-406-07451-9. 36€ (paper). George Sand's appropriation and reworking of the English Gothic novel constitute a series of techniques that the novelist employed to expose social issues and propose solutions corresponding to her ideals. Marilyn Mallia's monograph Présence du roman gothique anglais dans les premiers romans de George Sand investigates how Sand's use of gothic devices shaped her novels published between 1832 and 1843, which, in consequence, gave a breath of fresh air to the waning gothic genre. In a similar vein as Anne Radcliffe, Sand manipulates the Gothic genre to reveal and critique structural misogyny. Mallia examines how Sand reworked three aspects of the Gothic novel—the double, the Gothic journey, and the Gothic denouement of marriage or death—to engage with political issues and create autonomous female characters who struggle toward a legitimate position in society. Recognizing certain Gothic devices supporting a standstill in women's liberation from ideological constraints, Mallia is careful to avoid exaggerating the feminist (avant la lettre) traits in Sand's novels. Shining light on the social construction of antipodal excesses, the Gothic double or doppelganger allowed Sand to explore multiple facets constituting femininity, to create situations impossible for women under the Napoleonic Code, and to advocate for transgressive passions. In the novels Mallia studies, exceptionally ethereal or intransigent heroines never succeed in obtaining their objectives, thereby revealing the novelist's conception of a harmonious ideal of intelligent, active, sensual women. Physical and geographical mobility are paramount for the heroines of Sand's early novels. Whereas numerous scholars have examined the Gothic sites in Sand's oeuvre, Mallia focuses on the Gothic nature of the protagonists' itineraries. Following Isabelle Naginski's lead, Mallia demonstrates how Sand combined generic markers of the rite-of-passage novel and the Gothic novel, particularly in Consuelo, through the obstacles overcome during formative journeys. These peripatetic quests for freedom or the power to act favor situations for Sand's [End Page 226] heroines to take on mentally and physically active roles in their trajectories, often allowing them to save themselves instead of withering as passive victims. Furthermore, the parallel transformative expeditions completed by the hero and heroine, which Mallia analyzes in Mauprat, Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, suggest the possibility of egalitarian, collaborative relations between the two sexes. In contrast, female isolation in Sand's earlier novels, Indiana and Lélia, endows the title characters with less power to act. Mallia not only successfully demonstrates the ideological implications of Sandian peregrinations but also puts them in dialogue with those in English Gothic novels. The challenge of negotiating the Gothic denouement provided Sand with an optimal space for interrogating restrictions on women and proposing alternative conditions. In Sand's novels as well as in English Gothic novels, particularly Radcliffe's, the heroines' and anti-heroines' adventures conclude either in marriage or, as is often the case for transgressive or passive protagonists, in punishment. Sand's early novels do not detail definitive solutions; rather, through seemingly utopic or dystopic endings, the novels instigate debates aimed at ameliorating social and political problems. This final point which Mallia emphasizes is central for understanding Sandian idealism. In addition to investigating Sand's generic innovations, Mallia seeks to expand the notion of rewriting in the Gothic genre's Anglo-European dialogues. She argues that Sand enriched this exchange by weaving together Romantic and Gothic elements to create an experimental, hybrid genre. Making an important contribution to Romanticism studies, Mallia demonstrates how Sand used the Gothic genre, in particular the Radcliffian heroine or anti-heroine, to reappropriate the androcentric French Romantic novel as Sand's female protagonists display Romantic sensibilities and struggle with the mal du siècle. Mallia identifies a genealogy among the characters present in Sand's novels, the English Gothic, and Romanticism revealing the generic influences on Sand's work as well as her contributions to expanding the possibilities of both Romanticism and the...

Southern Neogothic: Trash and Terror in William Gay's Twilight and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse

Southern Neogothic:Trash and Terror in William Gay's Twilight and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse Lee Rozelle It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and leave them sightless. —William Gay, Twilight 164 Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely. How many of you have lingered over a rendering of my exploits or similar ones, lovingly detailed in its dismemberments, thinly veiled with moral indignation? How many of you have risked a glance at some wretched soul bleeding his life out on a highway shoulder? How many have slowed down for a better look? —Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse 158 The US South remains a common garbage dump for the American literary landscape, a popular place to drop off the nation's psychological, ecological, and human trash. Teresa Goddu explains in Gothic America that the South's "oppositional image—its gothic excesses and social transgressions—has served as the nation's safety valve: as the repository for everything the nation is not"; by "closely associating the gothic with the South, the American literary tradition neutralizes the gothic's threat to national identity" (76). The argument made in Goddu's oft-cited maxim is that if we can gothicize the South—make it the national literary backwoods where the abject materials and people are kept—then the nation might still see itself as a beacon of reason and democratic ideals. For Goddu, the US needs the Southern Gothic to provide this oppositional identity, a place to project the nation's more bestial side; as a result, to quote Allison Graham, it "continues to function as a repository of national repressions, as the benighted area 'down there' whose exposure to the light is unfailingly horrifying and thrilling" (349). As the "'dark' underbelly of the nation" and "the reversed image in the mass-media mirror," Graham argues, the South "was and [End Page 331] is America's repellent yet all too compelling Other" (335). From this perspective, the so-called dirty South serves as an imaginative landfill where American culture can abandon such troubles as harsh anti-immigrant policies, military waste, illiteracy, climate denial, water pollution, police brutality, and even potholes. No matter how bad things get, according to this logic, there's some consolation that it must be far worse down in that "bottomless pit of national ills" (Bjerre and Zawadka 3) below the Mason-Dixon line. Alternately rejecting and inflating such projections, Southern Gothic literature changed significantly in the era of Vietnam, the struggle for civil rights, and the growing recognition of ecological limits. As the region became more globalized and urban, works ranging from Cormac McCarthy's Suttree to Julia Elliot's The New and Improved Romie Futch reflected anxieties about its ecological future and the precarious link between modern advancement and social progress. Another muchused trope in the genre, the decay of natural landscapes, got caught up during this period in the national discussion of industrial pollution in the wake of such events as Love Canal and Three Mile Island. What began to emerge around 1970—the year of Deliverance and the first Earth Day—was a "Southern Neogothic" mode of writing that employs familiar elements of the Southern Gothic genre such as disability, spatial decay, poverty, and the grotesque to interrogate both neoconservative desires to "restore a sense of moral purpose . . that will form the stable center of the body politic" (Harvey 59) and neoliberal delusions of capital accumulation for business interests as "the only way to eradicate poverty and to deliver . . . higher living standards to the mass of the population" (25).1 Within a Southern Neogothic frame, grotesque human bodies not unlike those characterized in Faulkner, O'Connor, and Caldwell not only become embodiments of poverty and isolation but also give shape to such issues as environmental racism, industrial clear-cutting, trickle-down economics, and watershed toxicity. Southern Neogothic differs from Southern Gothic in other important ways. If the demons in Faulkner's and O'Connor's works tend to be psychological, Neogothicism's evil spirits are political, digital, and spatial...

The Architecture of Evil: H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ and Shirley Jackson'sThe Haunting of Hill House

This paper proposes that H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ (1932) and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) embody the Gothic idea of subversion through their use of space. Specifically, both texts are set in a house that is shaped according to a scale unknown and repulsive to humans, suggesting that the architecture of evil is out of scale literally and metaphorically. Walter Gilman's room in the Witch House is strangely shaped and represents a passage into a parallel world which Gilman, a mathematician firmly set into the world of scale, first believes to exist only in dreams. Similarly, the interior of the Hill House is off centre and disjointed. People get physically lost as the rooms are set in strange concentric circles which defy traditional architecture; more importantly, characters’ subjectivity is consumed and appropriated by the house. By depicting protagonists as scientists deeply invested in the research of the occult, both Jackson and Lovecraft juxtapose science, which is marked by taxonomies, systems, and scales, with entities and rituals that transcend scalable knowledge. As their projects fail, the perceived harmony and knowability of life is revealed as false. The collapse of scale in both texts unsettles the reader, as it suggests that evil refuses to comply and be contained within a specific human-designed system of measurement or value. With this, the texts confirm the Gothic genre's countercultural position within the literary canon.

A CONVERGENCE OF GENRES: GOTHIC AND SCIENCE FICTION IN FRANKENSTEIN

This article aims to analyze the novel Frankenstein, by Mary W. Shelley, from a perspective of literary genres. The work is believed to manifest both traits of the Gothic genre––due to its structure and common themes to the period it was published––and of what would in future be called the Science fiction genre. Those elements are here observed, in the novel as well as in the context of its creation. In this sense, there is a convergence of genres taking place, albeit one of them is in its nascent form: Shelley's novel antecipate a scientific interest that would be specified in later fiction, being derived from her legacy. Tzvetan Todorov's perspective is considered, inasmuch as he defends the presence of multiple genres inside a work of fiction, as well as the creation of new literary genres from other, pre-existent, ones. It is concluded that the novel manifests enough elements to comprise both the genres here discussed, with its common and different traits.

Reclaiming the Monster: Abjection and Subversion in the Marital Gothic Novel

This article explores literary representations of women over the centuries, from the witch of children’s fairy tales to the madwoman of the nineteenth century and the sexually voracious vamp of the twentieth century. Within this context, it examines the gothic novels Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) in relation to theories of Julia Kristeva and Margrit Shildrick. Both Kristeva and Shildrick explore the perception of the female form as ‘abject’ and relate this concept to the notion of the ‘monstrous feminine’ in cinema and literature. This article will also examine how these novels have taken the traditional tropes of the gothic genre and subverted them to expose the frustrations of mid-twentieth-century women. The gothic literary genre, initially dominated by male authors, has always been a natural home for both monsters and binary depictions of womanhood. According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, this binary view presented women as either angelic wives and mothers, or threats to family life and society. The gothic genre also explores the blurring of lines between these two elements of the binary female, and the terrifying idea of the monster in the home. Both Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea belong to a female gothic genre, and specifically to what Michelle A. Masse defines as the ‘marital gothic’, deploying many of the traditional motifs of the Gothic while striving to subvert depictions of womanhood shaped by patriarchal culture. The marital gothic subgenre exposes the rage of women entrapped in traditional, reductive and confining notions of femaleness, and the uncanny environment of the institution of marriage itself.

<b>Fantasmagoria poética: da sensibilidade gótica à moderna poesia autoconsciente

Estas considerações objetivam demonstrar os vínculos entre os recursos da poética do gótico, propiciadores dos efeitos de mistério, e o procedimento da sugestão, próprio do discurso autoconsciente da poesia moderna. As investigações tomam por objeto os poemas Le chambre gothique, da série Gaspard de la nuit, de Aloysius Bertrand (1895) e ‘Os Olhos’, da coletânea Pedra do Sono, de João Cabral de Melo Neto (1975). Busca-se evidenciar como a poesia gótica dá margem a uma forma de expressão elíptica que pode servir a imperativos da poesia moderna, tais como a busca pela autonomia da imagem poética e a tentativa de plasmar a consciência dos limites expressivos da poesia. Entre o gótico e a poesia moderna, observa-se a composição de um discurso oblíquo, em que os referenciais se mantêm ocultos, obrigando a fruição das imagens do poema como entidades autônomas. A categoria aqui definida como fantasmagoria poética emerge quando tais imagens articulam com a expressão sugestiva um sistema de representação que favorece o sobrenatural, o macabro e o sinistro. A partir da fantasmagoria poética, por fim, pretende-se explorar a permanência, na modernidade, de reminiscências das expressões mais extremadas do romantismo, enfeixadas pelo gênero gótico.

Post-Millennial Spectatorship and Horror Films: The Case of It (2017)

Horror has always been a favourite film genre with teenagers and younger audiences in general. There are various reasons for this. Baby boomers were the chosen target for the new genre, with its mix of science fiction and horror, typical of the period between the mid-Fifties and mid-Sixties. The monster family sitcoms of the Sixties domesticated horror and gothic genre, bringing it into the living room and offering it for family consumption. Later, in the Seventies and Eighties, with the emergence of the “slasher and splatter” movies, youngsters could identify with the main characters, themselves young, and share their uneasiness and anxiety in the face of permissiveness and sexual experimentation and, in the meantime, the necessity of a super ego punishment. Thus horror movies allowed one to experience one’s own fears in a safe environment, in the knowledge that fear is indispensable to personal growth. With this in mind, we were prompted to inquire whether horror films still exercise this fundamental function for post-millennials and, in an attempt to provide an answer, we chose It (2017) as a meaningful case study. We would argue that It is one of the best examples of a horror movie perfectly tailored to a generation a) whose attention spans have been reshaped by the constant use of smartphones and other mobile devices and b) whose cinema experience is subject to a continuous process of relocation on multiple platforms and digital networks. On the basis of our analysis, it can be said that It owes its success with younger viewers not merely to its being an audio-visual product capable of satisfying forms of multiscreen and polysensory consumption, but because it is a film which reflects the new spectatorship aesthetic of the Post-Millennials: an aesthetic which brings the cinematic experience closer to a relationship of intimate and reversible contact with the film’s surface, rather than a full immersion in a compelling narrative form; but also an expanded experience which accommodates the different facets of Post-Millennial viewer behaviour.

Gothic Healing under the Mediterranean Sun: “The Magus” by John Fowles as a Gothic Novel

The present paper aims at interpreting the novel The Magus by John Fowles within the framework of the Gothic genre. The argument shall be founded on a close analysis of chosen characteristics of the Gothic convention which can be identified within the text, such as the theatricality, the motif of insanity, as well as the issue of repressed sexuality. It shall also be argued that the novel presents the therapeutic role of fear, intrinsically linked to the Gothic mode of expression. The boundary between the rational and the irrational is suspended to the point that the protagonist is unable to tell whether the apparitions he sees in the Magus’s shadowy estate are of supernatural provenance or they constitute mere figments of his imagination deluded by the elements of the Mediterranean ambience. Remarkably, it is the experience of terror that ultimately heals Nicholas, an embittered and disillusioned young man, from the state of apathy and emotional handicap.

“Gothic” Elements in Seneca’s Tragedies

In the present article I discuss the remarkable fact that many of the motifs to be found in Seneca’s tragedies – such as a horrible death, a madman, an obsession or some supernatural agent – are also to be found in abundance in the work of “Gothic” authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, these motifs are now commonly considered to be the hallmark of the Gothic genre. I also analyse some of the techniques which Seneca uses in order to arouse fear and stimulate the reader’s imagination, comparing them with those used by Poe and other Gothic writers.

Z: The Beginning of Everything

Z: The Beginning of Everything

Mapping the Landscape with Sound: Tracking the Soundscape from Australian Colonial Gothic Literature to Australian Cinema and Australian Transcultural Cinema

This article explores how and why the Australian landscape was sonically mapped by Australian colonial Gothic writers and how these sonic descriptors came to be audibly translated into films of New Australian Cinema and, later, redeployed in Australian transcultural cinema. Australian colonial Gothic literature proved important for writers to describe and situate themselves within a foreign and uncanny landscape. The writers relied upon the sonic semantics of the Gothic genre to aurally envelop their characters within a spectral web—a world of exultant cries, piercing screams, rasping breaths, all permeating from the Australian landscape. New Australian Cinema drew on both the key sounds found in Australian Gothic fiction and the centrality of the sonic in this literary genre to tell similar stories of an uncanny Australia. By utilising three sonic conceptual tools—the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact, and the sonic spectre—and providing a close listening of Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1989) I examine how key sonic tropes from New Australian Cinema were enlisted by Australian transcultural cinema, but are silenced, manipulated, and repositioned to take on new meaning and tell very different stories of colonisation, settlement, and nation.

\u201cCycles upon cycles, stories upon stories\u201d: contemporary audio media and podcast horror\u2019s new frights

During the last ten years the ever-fertile horror and Gothic genres have birthed a new type of fright-fiction: podcast horror. Podcast horror is a narrative horror form based in audio media and the properties of sound. Despite association with oral ghost tales, radio drama, and movie and TV soundscapes, podcast horror remains academically overlooked. Podcasts offer fertile ground for the revitalization and evolution of such extant audio-horror traditions, yet they offer innovation too. Characterized by their pre-recorded nature, individualized listening times and formats, often “amateur” or non-corporate production, and isolation from an ongoing media stream more typical of radio or TV, podcasts potentialize the instigation of newer audio-horror methods and traits. Podcast horror shows vary greatly in form and content, from almost campfire-style oral tales, comprising listener-produced and performed content (Drabblecast; Tales to Terrify; NoSleep); to audio dramas reminiscent of radio’s Golden Era (Tales from Beyond the Pale; 19 Nocturne Boulevard); to dramas delivered in radio-broadcast style (Welcome to Night Vale; Ice Box Theatre); to, most recently, dramas, which are themselves acknowledging and exploratory of the podcast form (TANIS; The Black Tapes Podcast; Lime Town). Yet within this broad spectrum, sympathies and conventions arise which often not only explore and expand notions of Gothic sound, but which challenge broader existing horror and Gothic genre norms. This article thus demonstrates the extent to which podcast horror uses its audio form, technology and mediation to disrupt and evolve Gothic/horror fiction, not through a cumulative chronological formulation of podcast horror but through a maintained and alternately synthesized panorama of forms. Herein new aspects of generic narration, audience, narrative and aesthetic emerge. Exploring a broad spectrum of American and British horror podcasts, this article shows horror podcasting to utilize podcasting’s novel means of horror and Gothic distribution/consumption to create fresh, unique and potent horror forms. This article reveals plot details about some of the podcasts examined.

\u201cAn authentic ghost story\u201d: manipulating the gothic in Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin

Perhaps the most memorable—and almost certainly the most harrowing—portions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin occur during Tom’s time at the Legree plantation: a narrative plunge into the horrors of slavery in the Deep South, and a stylistic plunge into the realm of the Gothic. This study seeks to engage this section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of the Gothic genre, and, in so doing, reveal Stowe’s Gothic turn to be not, as some scholars have suggested, merely superficial appropriation, but rather a sophisticated manipulation of genre that culminates in a Christianization of the Gothic. By exploring Stowe’s use of Gothic figures and devices—the setting of the crumbling Louisiana plantation, the threefold Gothic female represented by Cassy, and the “haunting” of Legree—in the light of both European and American Gothic fiction, this study demonstrates how the trappings of the Gothic genre can be used to refresh and further Stowe’s progressive Christian narrative, one which ultimately refutes the Gothic by seeding it in a universe where peace, freedom, and Christian redemption are possible. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror.

The Shadow of the Past. The Lord of the Rings and the Gothic Novel

The present paper is devoted to the question of the past in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in reference to the Gothic Novel and the way it approaches this subject. As an introduction I provide some background as to the definition and origins of both gothic and fantasy genres. I want to prove that they share many similarities and point out the connections between them. In the main part of my paper I present the creation of the past in the Gothic Novel and in The Lord of the Rings, showing that the past plays a very important role on both extratextual – as an inspiration for a writer – and intratextual levels – as a source of nostalgia, fascination and fear. This article was based on my bachelor’s thesis Elements of the Gothic convention in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King, and the Horror in BetweenRebeccaJanicker. McFarland, 2015.

Literary Haunted House: Lovecraft, Matheson, King, and the Horror in Between Rebecca Janicker. McFarland, 2015.To discuss the role of what she calls the house motif in facilitating the creation of liminal spaces where past and present directly interact, Rebecca Janicker employs a series of case studies featuring works from three of America's most wellknown horror writers. An extended introduction situates these texts in the gothic genre, before outlining theoretical foundations for concepts of space and liminality around which Janicker's arguments circulate. Each chapter has a given story as its chief focus, beginning with H. P. Lovecraft's The Dreams in the Witch House (1933), followed by Richard Matheson's A Stir of Echoes (1958) and Earthbound (1982/1989), then finishing with a run through Stephen King's Shining (1977), Christine (1983), and Bag of Bones (1998).Accompanied at times by references to each other or additional stories from each respective author, these case studies are viewed in relation to themes from within their contemporary historical settings: the impact of science, urbanization, immigration, and modernity for Lovecraft; suburbanization and nostalgia for Matheson; and class, family, nostalgia, and race for King. A brief conclusion closes the study by gesturing toward the potential applicability of Janicker's work across print and other media.The book's broad scope and tendency to wander across varied historical contexts and concerns make it difficult to place within any specific set of academic literature. While Janicker is aware of some newer research and includes a brief list in her conclusion (168), these sources are not integrated within the study itself which largely uses older material. This has the effect of placing the parallel to recent studies of the chosen authors, haunting in fiction and the gothic/horror genres more broadly. A striking omission from the bibliography is Andrew Smith's Ghost Story, 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010). Despite dealing primarily with older texts, Smith nevertheless engages with concepts of history and haunted houses in his chapter about Henry James. Smith's skillful discussion of the interplay between history and haunting could have been used to great effect by Janicker.In the preface we are told that the book began as a PhD project (ix). Based on its stylistic attributes, little was done in the conversion from thesis to monograph. …

Deslocamentos e identidades no gótico australiano: o caso de Picnic at Hanging Rock e Piquenique na Montanha Misteriosa

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p199O romance Picnic at Hanging Rock, de Joan Lindsay (1967), e sua adaptação cinematográfica homônima dirigida por Peter Weir (1975), comercializada no Brasil como Piquenique na Montanha Misteriosa, têm intrigado leitores e espectadores há mais de quatro décadas. Ambientadas na Austrália rural de 1900, as narrativas ilustram o gênero gótico australiano ao tratar do misterioso desaparecimento de três alunas e uma professora de um internato repressor, durante um piquenique na montanha. Partindo das reflexões de Linda Hutcheon (2011) sobre adaptações, analisamos em que medida as narrativas literária e cinematográfica dialogam; já as reflexões de Susan Bassnett (2006) e Kristi Siegel (2004) sobre relatos de viagem femininos nos permitem pensar as temáticas da sexualidade feminina e do deslocamento no espaço como metáfora da transformação do indivíduo.