Gothic Fiction Research Articles

Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Poe-Related PhD Dissertations (2017–2021)

Puritan Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter" And Stephen King’s "Carrie"

It is considered that the Puritans that populated New England in the 17th century left a distinctive mark on the American culture. The article explores some projections of Puritan legacy in two American novels of different periods – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). After establishing a connection between the Puritan writings and gothic literature, the two novels are analyzed in terms of some Puritan projections, among which are the problem of guilt and the acceptance of an individual in the society. Some references regarding the idea of the witch and the interpretations it bears, especially in terms of the female identity, are also identified. Despite the different approach of the authors in terms of building their characters, those references are mostly used in a negative way, as an instrument of criticism and exposing inconvenient truths.

Counter-narratives

Adrian A. Husain, “Counter-narratives: Wuthering Heights and the Intervals of the Brutalized Self” (pp. 33–56) This essay is concerned with meaning and genre and how these become accessible in our encounter with the critically strange. The focus is on a deconstruction and redefinition, by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847), of “reality” as a given of domestic realism and a situating of the “real” in the interstices of Gothic romance and domestic realism. The essay contends that Brontë perceives the question of reality and the related question of genre as initially arising at the level of reading and as a problematic of perception necessarily linked to the esoteric nature of literary discourse itself. That reality, to be inclusive, must allow for the crucial idea of pain and the sentient self is understood. The departure from contemporary fiction is seen as involving a symbiosis and at the same time a radical disjunction between civil and visceral, localized and phantasmagorical, whereby a renewed reality—a new narrative space—is enabled to come about. Wuthering Heights is perceived as moving away, with a view to achieving a realized meaning, from the deliberate construct of language toward an involuntary and fragmented mimetic mode—or a language of the gut—more directly expressive of emotion. The essay argues that the production of a hybridized temporal perspective—or a “Bergsonian” time—is equally part of Brontë’s quest for reality.

From the Guest Editor: The Legacy of Poe’s Graphicality in the Expanded Field

From the Guest Editor: The Legacy of Poe’s Graphicality in the Expanded Field

From the Guest Editor

From the Guest Editor

Book Review: John D. Lyons (ed.): The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales Dale Townshend: Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840

Book Review: John D. Lyons (ed.): <i>The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales</i> Dale Townshend: <i>Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840</i>

‘We’re Going to Make You into a Proper Woman’: Postfeminist Gender Performativity and the Supernatural in Penny Dreadful (2014-2016)

Neo-Victorian Gothic fiction exploits the supernatural to achieve social and sexual emancipation for women, shaping the narrative into what Esther Saxey defines as the ‘liberation plot’ (2010). John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) explores how female characters transgress heteronormative gender roles with the assistance of supernatural forces. My main aim is to show how the series fails to grant the female protagonists a sense of feminist liberation, punishing them instead for their subversion of socially imposed gender acts. In applying Saxey’s (2010) and other supplementary approaches to gender emancipation, I analyse the female characters’ failed attempt at achieving it by unleashing their supernatural doubles. In doing so, I show that—in spite of Penny Dreadful’s apparent advocacy for female emancipation—its misogynistic vilification of vindictive women can be understood as part of the show’s postfeminist context of production.

The Banality of the Monsterous

Rupetta (Sulway, 2013) is a post-modern reinterpretation of the Jewish Golem fable. The mechanical “woman” created in the story has been said to express sentience and immortality. For the most part, this is not directly the monster’s own ability but instead comes from the life force of the women who “wynd” her. The story has been called fantasy and science fiction, romance and Gothic horror (Hourigan, 2018). However, there is no science in fiction. Worse, there is nothing new.

The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales. Edited by John D. Lyons

<i>The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales</i>. Edited by <scp>John D. Lyons</scp>

Elizabeth Bowen and the Politics of Consent

As a novelist preoccupied with the sexualized gothic conventions haunting Irish fiction since the eighteenth century, Bowen persistently turns to the fraught concept of British and Irish women's consent during periods of twentieth-century political violence. This article considers Bowen's use of gothic tropes of consent in The Last September (1929) as well as a more sustained engagement with the Irish gothic, citizen-subjecthood, and the political valence of consent in her WWII thriller, The Heat of the Day (1948). It argues that in formulating consent in relation to knowledge, and in articulating the necessarily contractual nature of consent, Bowen seeks to define the ethics of individual rights and responsibility during and after World War Two.

Can I Be Frank with You?

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.

Jekyll, Hyde and the Victorian Construction of Criminal Working-Class Masculinities

Violent crime has long been associated with ideas of insane and/or intrinsically dangerous masculinities in the global north. Victorian Gothic literature, generated during a period when positivist discourse around dangerousness, madness and crime was gaining in authority and coherence, provides particularly useful insights into the narratives underpinning these associations. This paper focuses on the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which, being a work of cautionary horror written during an era of powerful cultural fascination with violent urban crime is particularly rich in such discourse. A range of methodological tools borrowed from literary criticism, legal studies and discourse analysis turn Stevenson's novella into a penetrative lens to examine the anxieties of 19th century medico-legal thinking. The many layers of the Jekyll-Hyde binary are analysed along a series of other relevant binaries that characterise many Victorian narratives around crime: reason against insanity, normativity against deviance, and respectable bourgeois masculinities against uncontrollable working-class masculinities, whose savage sexuality poses a threat to social order. Contextualised historically as part of the wider fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration theory, as well as legally, having followed a long series of legislative and policing moves to control the disconcerting underclasses amassing in urban spaces, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde arises as a uniquely informative testament of the profound contradictions of a terrified post-Industrial Revolution Europe – what Moretti (1982) would call a dialectic of fear. Narratives such as the ones unfurling in the Strange Case are not, however, taken as mere reflections of the activities and anxieties of the Victorian medico-legal apparatus. Rather, this paper finds that the tensions permeating the novella constitute elements of a wider narrative construct whose main achievement was the validation and naturalisation of a deeply rigid social taxonomy, justifying the exertion of social and legal control upon populations inscribed as monstrous and Other. Keywords: Law and Literature, Criminology, Victorian Studies, Masculinities, Legal Psychiatry

Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

"Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. This article focuses on the way Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey’s heroine, is influenced and even guided by the literature she either chooses or is given to read. Her reading habits, as well as her changing typologies as a reader, influence both the development of her character and the narrative. This study also debunks the idea that Northanger Abbey is a parody of Gothic fiction, contextualizing book reading in an age when the novel was yet to be considered a respectable literary genre. Keywords: wise reader, the avid reader, the hypocritical reader, character development, narrative development, Gothic fiction, novel theory"

Imperatyw konkretyzacji

Imperative of Concretization: Translational Shifts and the Models of Reception of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Prose – The Case Study of "The Outsider" and its Polish Versions&#x0D; The Article discusses translational reception of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s prose in Poland on the example of his short story The Outsider. The gothic tale of a mysterious recluse visiting human society, in its original version, has no explicit interpretation due to the fact that the maincharacter’s identity is intentionally left by Lovecraft without precise and unambiguous explanation for its readers to determine. Polish versions, however, modified in the process of interlinguistic transfer, are aimed at concretization of the text, and thus solving this interpretational puzzle with different answers given by five translators (Grzegorz Iwanciw, Robert Lipski, Ewa Morycińska-Dzius, Mateusz Kopacz and Maciej Płaza), influenced by a variety of factors: image of the American writer, knowledge of his other literary works, implied readers of the translations and artistic trends popular in Polish literature.

“No Woman, Much Less a Woman of Fortune, is Ever Fit to Be Her Own Mistress”: Gender, Wealth, and Agency in Inheritance Novels from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

, This article compares the agency of heiresses with that of male heirs in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels focused on inheritance to investigate whether heiresses faced more restrictions on their financial and personal freedom compared with other characters from the period due to their fortune. We test James Thompson’s claim that “inheritance is enabling or authorizing for male protagonists and disabling for female protagonists” using computational analysis of a corpus of twenty-nine novels and combine our results with close reading of the novels from our corpus. We found that the representation of heiresses’ and heirs’ agency varies according to genre. Heiresses had more agency than expected, this was especially the case for heiresses in gothic fiction. We noticed a decline in the agency of male heirs in the nineteenth century compared with the eighteenth century, while the agency of other character types such as unmoneyed characters appears to increase.

Raw as life: the Queer, the Goth and the Gothic in Lost Souls, by Poppy Z. Brite

The Goth Subculture features a highly performative disposition relating to sexuality, body, and gender; thus, the scene promotes the emergence of queer identities. The transgender author Poppy Z. Brite inserts his novel Lost Souls in this context as one of the few authors of Gothic fiction to relate his work to the subculture of the same name. In this article I discuss the Goth Subculture parallel to Butler's gender theory, and I also discuss the character development of Nothing, Lost Souls’ protagonist, relating it to the aesthetics of the Goth scene. This study was financed in part by the Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

Reproduction Beyond Hu/Man Extinction: Detoxifying Care in Latin American Anthropocene Fictions

Anxieties around failed parenting are linked to humanity’s failed stewardship of the planet in many recent Anthropocene narratives, yet the figure of the biological human child, as *the* signifier of futurity draws attention to the difficulty of imagining the future in non-heteronormative, non-Western, and non-anthropocentric terms. Reproduction is nothing if not a replication of self, of forms of life that are like us. In order to recuperate an alternative model of care from its anthropocentric lineage, I examine how Anacristina Rossi’s feminist sci-fi story ‘Abel’ and Samantha Schweblin’s gothic horror novella Distancia de Rescate (2014) perform radical critiques of the idea of reproductive bodies, while at the same time opening out to signal non-binary possibilities of life, offering species-level critique while at the same time remaining rooted in local geographies. These stories embrace the negative implications of Anthropocene thinking, challenging, reflecting, and perpetuating anxieties around sexual difference and the possibility of human extinction, without relying on essentialised mandates about femininity, childbearing and care giving. They engage with what Claire Colebrook calls ‘figural extinction’ as a way to signal the possibility of moving away from historically toxic androcentric, capitalist and anthropocentric visions of care, and toward an ethic of non/human connection.

Neoliberalism and the undead gothic subject in Daybreakers

ABSTRACT The vampire of classic gothic fiction has long been recognized as allegory for industrial capitalism of the late 1800s – an assertion influenced by Karl Marx’s apt description of capitalism as vampirish. Indeed, Dracula is a true monopolist – a rational entrepreneur who is driven to accumulate, expand, and suck the living of their toil. Accordingly, if this is the case, what does the vampire of modern economic practices and political strategies look like? This article examines how the politics of neoliberalism, economic globalization and the rise of financial capitalism are interwoven into vampire fiction of the twenty-first century focusing on Michael and Peter Spierig’s 2009 sci-fi horror film Daybreakers.

العامل القوطي في أسرار أدولفو لآن رادكليف

The paper attempts to analyse the gothic element in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The paper presents the study in the essay form and it begins with a presentation of the gothic romance and its significance, characteristics and nature as a genre and in the novel of this study. The paper points out the types of the gothic school for Radcliffe is a representative of the school of terror while Lewis the school of horror. The study concentrates on Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as a gothic romance which narrates the story of Emily St. Aubert, and Valencourt, who faced a thousand obstacles, and perils thrown in their way. The heroine finds herself separated from the man she loves, and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her. The study ends with a conclusion that states the main ideas in the study. Key words: Gothic element, Gothic Romamce, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, terror, horror

‘Powers of Their Own Which Mere “Modernity” Cannot Kill’: The Doppelgänger and Temporal Modernist Terror in Dracula

Of the many haunting figures that Gothic fiction invokes, none so perfectly encapsulates the mode itself, in all its fantastic incursions of opposing forces and clashing sensibilities, as the doppelgänger. Indeed, this figure in Gothic literature helps to push the bounds of subjective tension so central to the genre. This article examines Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as an entry into the canon of doppelgänger fiction by complicating traditional readings of the central relationship between Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker. By revisiting the novel within the framework of a doppelgänger narrative, this article suggests that part of the real terror for Stoker's fin-de-siècle audience lies in the novel's timing. Located in the gap between the retreating Romantic and advancing high modern epochs, the novel dramatizes the apprehensions of a culture experiencing enormous technological and social upheaval. Specifically, it offers in its doubled pair a means to navigate those anxieties.