Gothic Motifs Research Articles

Orientalist Desires and Gothic Manifestations: A Study of William Beckford's 'Vathek'

This study offers a critical analysis of Gothic motifs and Orientalist themes in William Beckford’s Vathek with a view of how the latter contributes to the construction and reproduction of the ideological boundaries between the East and the West which are underpinned by cultural and moral differentialism. This way, the research illustrates how fear, horror and the supernatural are mobilised by Beckford to represent the Oriental as a space that is inherently dangerous and spiritually degenerate. The focus is also made on how the settings of the novel the confusing, infernal halls of Eblis, the vast, mysterious landscapes are not just the background, but characters themselves who embody and intensify the main character’s moral and spiritual degeneration. Furthermore, the penetration provided by the study gives insights as to how figures such as Nouronihar and Carathis exemplify yet disrupt the Orientalist stereotype of the fatal female. Due to this research, the interconnectivity between Gothic and Orientalist Studies has been presented, and it gives an insight into how socio-political imperialisms such as culture supremacy are perpetuated by Vathek. In other words, the findings enrich extant scholarly debate by offering an analytic of how the two architectonic styles weave together in the novel, to create cultural and moral ideologies.

Gothic Introspection: How Villette Nurtures Empathy and Reader Identity

While Charlotte Brontë is considered one of the foremost nineteenth-century writers of Gothic psychological realism, scholars have paid little attention to how a reading of the psychologies of her characters may impact readers’ thoughts on their own identity and mental state. This article redresses this gap by combining the field of Gothic Studies with narrative empathy studies to posit that Brontë’s use of Victorian Gothic motifs in her novel Villette (1853), such as the doppelgänger, excess and the abject, prompts readers into considering the struggles of their psychological well-being and how it affects their identity. Through entering a reflection on personal psychological adversity, readers are encouraged to consider how Villette teaches audiences the power of understanding how psychological maladies impact selfhood. This article will analyse how Lucy’s narration, her relationship with the Nun and the novel’s ending connect to Lucy’s psychology and, therefore, create empathetic connections with readers who can better understand their own experiences and mental well-being after reading Villette.

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

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

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney

Reviewed by: EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers ed. by Sue Edney Lindsay Wells (bio) EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers, edited by Sue Edney; pp. xviii + 217. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, £85.00. EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Phantoms, Fantasy and Uncanny Flowers begins its analysis of horticulture, literature, and environmental thought by questioning the apparent incompatibility of its objects of study: the orderly garden and the chaotic Gothic. As editor Sue Edney observes in her introduction to the volume, the “human dominance” that seemingly defines horticultural space starts to dissipate when viewed through the lens of the Gothic—an expressive mode that “allows us to question human ability to control events, people or even places.” The essays that comprise this collection explore this process from a diverse range of perspectives, from landscape studies and history of science to new materialism and the plant humanities. Each chapter brings fresh attention to the ecological and Gothic undercurrents of nineteenth-century gardens, resulting in a compelling exposition of not only the term ecoGothic, but also the “uncanny deeds and presences” that haunt the archives of horticultural history (1). As its title suggests, this volume connects recent ecocritical readings of Gothic narrative to both real and imaginary gardens of the nineteenth century. While the book features essays on German and American literature, the majority of its chapters concentrate on British texts, with a particular emphasis on Victorian fiction. The project builds on Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s edited collection Ecogothic (2013), as well as the 2014 special issue of Gothic Studies (1999–present) on the same subject. The contributors to Edney’s volume take these earlier studies in new directions by identifying the garden as a vital component of the ecoGothic paradigm, which interprets monstrosity, repression, and other Gothic motifs from an environmental angle. The prominence of uncanny plants and landscapes in British culture comes into clear focus throughout this collection, with each author demonstrating the ways in which nineteenth-century gardens afford thought-provoking explorations of the natural world. One of the key contributions that EcoGothic Gardens makes to Victorian studies is the link it forges between new materialism and critical plant studies—two schools of thought with a shared interest in the nonhuman. The impact of new materialism and material ecocriticism on recent analyses of Victorian culture has been significant, and many of the contributors to EcoGothic Gardens engage with this discourse. Shelley Saguaro, for instance, reads the gardens in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) alongside Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene. In a similar respect, Teresa Fitzpatrick connects Stacy Alaimo’s work on trans-corporeality to carnivorous plant fiction from the fin de siècle. Other chapters, meanwhile, draw on insights from Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Serenella Iovino, and Serpil Oppermann. EcoGothic Gardens sustains the ongoing exchange between new materialism and Victorian studies, yet it also embraces related scholarship on the animacy of plants. Several of the book’s contributors engage with Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga’s work on plant horror, Monica Gagliano’s research on vegetal communication, and Michael Marder’s theories on plants and philosophy. EcoGothic Gardens demonstrates the ways in which reinterpretations of material and vegetal vibrancy might be brought into productive dialogue with one another, especially when dealing with Victorian horticulture. [End Page 720] Even the most regimented of gardens examined in this book threaten to undermine the will of their human caretakers with a vegetal vitality that exceeds all control. In her essay on the early-nineteenth-century fiction of Joseph von Eichendorff and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heather I. Sullivan refines the concept of the ecoGothic into what she terms “the ‘Gothic green,’” or instances when “the human is, in some way, subsumed by vegetal forces” (17). The collaboration (and confrontation) between human and vegetal agents in gardens continually resurfaces throughout this book, including Edney’s chapter on Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830) and Maud (1855). “In gardens,” Edney writes, “nature and culture are conspirators as well as co-workers” (168). This observation lies at the conceptual...

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.

READING DOYLE’S „THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES“ THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE GOTHIC GENRE

The exploitation of Gothic elements in detective fiction was long regarded as a skillful way to create an atmosphere of suspense and mystery. However, writers have often relied on the power of the Gothic not only to intrigue and unsettle the reader, but also, more importantly, to direct attention to complex taboo topics of their time. This essen- tial function of the Gothic can be identified in Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, which alludes to many delicate issues of the fin-de-siècle British society, including violence, mental illness, and criminality. These phenomena were often exam- ined by late Victorians in the light of degeneration theory, which held that abnormal forms of behavior were signs of bad heredity and bio- logical regression. Thus, this paper investigates whether degeneration theory played a role in Doyle’s characterization of the novel’s criminal antagonist Jack Stapleton by focusing on how his appearance, behavior, and actions are represented in the text. It is argued that Doyle delib- erately uses the Gothic motif of duality to disperse the illusion of a clear boundary between the civilized “self” and the barbaric “other,” thereby implicitly stressing the complexity of human nature. Accordingly, the analysis, which rests on Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, reveals that Stapleton’s moral decay should not be read as an indicator of his hereditary predisposition toward crime but rather as a result of mental tensions that he fails to control.

Dystopia, surveillance and the spaces of social control in Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon (2012)

Although Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon (2012) does not qualify as a classic dystopia detailing a possible and undesirable future state of society, the novel shares some traits of the genre, including a protagonist struggling with a system against which she rebels. The dystopian space par excellence seems to be that delimited by the walls of the Panopticon, here an institution for young delinquents, which finds a counterpoint in the shape of an island utopia, a destination that becomes a symbol of harmony and freedom. However, panoptic space, contrary to what is asserted in the text, does not shelter the omnipresent and omniscient surveillance of which the Panopticon and Big Brother have become emblems. In contrast to the supposedly grid-like space of the Panopticon, readers find a literal space which is rich in nooks and crannies and a literary space which reveals an intertextual depth that draws, among other things, on a number of Gothic motifs. Although the text explicitly reappropriates the Panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an invention itself riven by the tension between utopia and dystopia, and echoes Michel Foucault’s strategic reading in Discipline and Punish (1975), the virulent critique it levels at the welfare state echoes some of the central issues to be found in George Orwell's attack on totalitarian states, particularly those related to memory and language. The adoption of a first-person narrator allows Fagan to speak out against surveillance that consists in control only and to oppose dehumanizing institutional discourse.

Aspects of Gothic Tradition in the Literary Imagination of Nnedi Okorafor

The Gothic writing has often been perceived as a form of Western fiction- making. This apparently is based on the fact that Gothic genre originated in Europe in the late 18th century and has been widely exploited in the West (Europe and North America). Contrary to these assumptions, it can be confirmed that Gothic mode has indeed been appropriated by many non–Western fiction writers. An in- depth interrogation of Nnedi Okorafor’s, selected novels like ‘Who Fears death’, Akata Witch and The Book of Phoenix reveal that she does indeed appropriate Gothic elements. This article therefore critically examines aspects of Gothic tradition in Nnedi Okorafor’s selected novels. It seeks to portray how unique Gothic motifs like monstrosity, villainy and morality have been appropriated, transformed and complicated in Nnedi Okorafor’s selected novels ‘Who Fears death’, ‘Akata Witch’ and ‘The Book of Phoenix’. This study found out that that the three motifs indeed exist in Okorafor’s selected novels and are closely related. Gothic Monsters are generally implicated in subversion of social norms and nature. This often renders them villainous and their defeat, as portrayed in the analysed texts, leads to a restoration of moral order in a given society. Yet the findings affirm that physical or moral monstrosity of a character does not necessarily qualify her or him to be a villain. Villainy is tied to innate monstrosity which manifests itself through characters’ inhuman, unjust, and oppressive attitude towards the perceived other. This piece therefore concludes that Nnedi Okorafor does indeed appropriate the Gothic motifs of monstrosity, villainy and morality in a manner that offers radically fresh means of highlighting Africa’s complex reality.

Book Review: Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject by Chloé Germaine Buckley

Children’s literature has long intertwined with Gothic motifs, yet contrasting with the profound Gothic inheritance of children’s literature, the relevant research remains to be a relatively new direction, which has gained increasing popularity only in recent years. As the newest monograph in the field, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: from the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject brings out an exciting outlook to children’s Gothic studies, tracing through a range of children’s Gothic fictions between 2000 and 2015. Following Braidotti’s account of nomadic subjectivity, the book’s author Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley concludes that the theme of homelessness is a major concern for post-millennial children’s Gothic, which does not lead to despair but positive possibilities to new lives, regarding homelessness as nomadism—a concept echoing with the nomadic ethics of Deleuze’s philosophy, which expresses a process ontology that values change and motion over stability (Braidotti, 2013, p. 344).

Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg (review)

Reviewed by: Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution by Karen Grumberg Maya Barzilai Karen Grumberg. Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 328 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000295 The title of Karen Grumberg's 2019 book, Hebrew Gothic, states what is not obvious: modern Hebrew literature has not been often associated with the [End Page 473] European Gothic and its ghosts, supernatural phenomena, haunted castles, crypts, and labyrinths. Grumberg herself contends that the Gothic mode might appear at first "incompatible with the aesthetic and the setting of Israel/Palestine" (3). Over the course of this lucidly written volume, however, she makes a compelling case for considering Hebrew writers' engagement with the European and American Gothic. Through comparative readings of Hebrew fiction alongside popular Gothic works by Horace Walpole and Edgar Alan Poe, Grumberg shows that scholarship of Hebrew literature stands to gain from a reassessment of this corpus outside the conventional frameworks of Hebrew literary history and more classical European literature. The twentieth-century writers Grumberg discusses did not adopt the Gothic wholesale, but rather appropriated Gothic themes and conventions to offer a critical examination of the Jewish past; they also drew on the Gothic tradition in order to address the ambivalence inherent to Jewish nationalism, reopening wounds such as the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. The European Gothic has allowed Jewish writers to call into question the narration of past events, to engage both history and historiography. In Hebrew Gothic, Grumberg constellates European and American works with Hebrew literature spanning the early twentieth-century writers S. Y. Agnon, Dvora Baron, and Yaakov Shteinberg, through Leah Goldberg's mid-twentieth-century theatrical writing, to novels by Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. She productively pairs Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Israeli writer Almog Behar's short story "Ana min al-yahoud" (I'm one of the Jews), and concludes the book with parody and black humor in twenty-first-century Gothic-inspired Israeli film and television. At the outset, Grumberg points out that "it is not only what gothic texts do but also how they do it that makes them gothic" (6). In other words, the transgression of established social, cultural, and national boundaries in Gothic works unleashes a state of anxiety, an atmosphere of terror. The Gothic trades in instability, Grumberg explains, and this instability stems from the return of repressed narratives in Gothic literature. One of the central questions Hebrew Gothic poses concerns how twentieth-century Hebrew writers engaged historical events in order to comment on the Jewish and Zionist present and future. In many of Grumberg's case studies, supernatural motifs and gothic scenes allow writers to interrupt linear narratives of national conquest and triumph, as well as to call into question gender norms and expectations. Divided into two parts, "A Spectralized Past" and "Haunted Nation," Hebrew Gothic balances works that contend with the Jewish European past with post-1948 Hebrew literature. Reading Agnon's macabre Polish stories, Grumberg shows how the author appropriated stereotypes of the Wandering Jew and the bloodthirsty Jew in order to "recalibrate the dynamics of victims and oppressors," assigning antisemitic tropes to Christian figures. The issue of victimization returns in the chapter on maternal figures in stories by Baron and Shteinberg. In contrast to the passive and repressed Gothic heroine, Grumberg reads the "gothic agunah" as both "excessively present" and "defiant" or resistant through her affect (85). Grumberg previously explored Space and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2012) and her current book likewise focuses on the spatiotemporal dimensions of the Hebrew Gothic. She focuses, for instance, on the [End Page 474] cuckoo clock in Leah Goldberg's "Lady of the Castle," interpreting it as a foreboding Gothic motif that also invites a spatial reading, as it leads to a secret passageway and room where Lena, a Holocaust survivor, remained locked away even after the war's conclusion. Grumberg's comparative analysis, drawing on the work of Poe, suggests that Goldberg narrated the castle as a spiritual sanctuary in response to the demand placed on her to produce ideologically enlisted literature. The notion of a "conflicted Zionism," becomes relevant also for Oz and Yehoshua...

"Uncanny" in Joanna Bator's novel Dark, Almost Night

Analysing gothic motifs in Joanna Bator's novel, the author finds uncanny objects like a key or a knife. However, the most terrifying motif connected with the "dismemberment" of the body of the Wałbrzych prophet is deprived of the uncanny because of its satirical approach. However, it can be found in motifs related to motherhood.

The reproduction of the gothic motifs of Frankenstein in the COVID-19 journalistic discourse: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach

The recent horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic have renewed interest in Gothic fiction in general and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in particular. The image of Frankenstein has become associated with the COVID-19 discourses (e.g. literary, journalistic, medical, and social media) as reflected in the representation of the horrors of isolation and contagion. The influence of the novel is clearly reflected in literary, medical, scientific, and everyday discourses today. Despite the prolific literature on the representation of Gothic elements and motifs, reflections on Gothic motifs in the reproduction of COVID-19 discourse have not yet been elaborated. In light of this, the paper seeks to explore the manipulation and reproduction of Shelley’s Frankenstein in the COVID-19 journalistic discourse. A corpus of 542 editorials and opinion commentaries from 83 newspapers was built. The corpus included only editorials and opinions written in English. Corpus-based critical discourse analysis was used. The results indicate that the Gothic motifs of Frankenstein are manipulated and reproduced in the journalistic discourse of COVID-19 to depict the chaos and destruction caused by the enormously powerful and catastrophic virus/monster that has come to rule the world. The COVID-19 journalistic discourse based on the fictional image of Frankenstein represents a distinct discourse genre that manipulates Gothic motifs in the thematic representations of the horrors associated with the pandemic itself on the one hand, and the social, economic and political problems and crises that have shaken the stability of the entire world on the other. It can be concluded that this representation has been developed and generated from the interaction between the writers and the text of Frankenstein.

The vampires of A. V. Ivanov in light of the gothic tradition of Russian Literature

The object of this research is the novel “Food Block” by A. V. Ivanov and the realization of aesthetics of the horror genre therein. The goal is to establish correlation between the gothic tradition of Russian literature and modern horror literature based on the works of the indicated authors. The article examines the influence of the gothic romantic tradition upon composition and imaginary system of A. K. Tolstoy’s novella. The material of A. V. Ivanov’s novel indicates resorting to the literary tradition on the level of composition and individual images; while overall, the historical experience accumulated by the genre over the decades and significant impact of cinematography manifested on the level of cinematographic techniques. The conclusion is made that in the novel by A. V. Ivanov, the mystical attributes of vampirism, which coincide with the pioneer symbolism, have political implications, which contradicts the horror traditions in gothics. Novellas “The Vampire” and" The Family of the Vourdalak” are the result of accumulation of gothic motifs, such as family curse, mystical house, dream, and portrait that came alive. Comparison of the techniques of creating horror literature allows tracing the paths of literary evolution, and formulating conclusions on modernization of the genre at the present stage. The novelty of this research is define by insufficient research of the topic of typological and genetic links between gothic and modern horror, namely in the works of A. V. Ivanov.

Produktionens skyggespil


 
 
 The production novel is widely considered to be the most exemplary socialist-realist genre regarding ideological and narrative conformity. The scholarly reception of the genre has hitherto paid little attention to its many incongruent stylistic features, including its striking Gothic motifs. I argue that they carry both literary and political imports, which are yet to be explored in depth. In this article, I pursue the Gothic motifs in the genre’s first and most exemplary incarnation, Feodor Gladkov’s Cement from 1925.
 
 

Laurence Talairach. Gothic Remains. Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897

In Gothic Remains, Laurence Talairach develops her analysis of various Gothic motifs in several novels from both canonical and humble authors between 1764 and 1897, showing how medical literature and the Gothic cross-influenced each other, to the point of sometimes blurring the limits between fiction and reality. The book itself mirrors the themes of fragmentation dear to the Gothic literature it offers to analyse: in each of the five chapters, the author dissects a particular Gothic motif, l...

Ultraviolent Gothic Visions: Lucio Fulci's ‘Gates of Hell’ Trilogy as Derridean Cinematic Haunted Spaces

This article examines films produced by the Italian director Lucio Fulci between 1980 and 1981: City of the Living Dead/Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980), The Beyond/L'aldilà (1981), and The House by the Cemetery/Quella villa accanto al cimitero (1981). Unofficially termed the Gates of Hell trilogy, the films stress a distinctive gothic sensibility brought together by the vivid and extreme subjects of decay and unflinching depictions of ultraviolent death and bodily destruction. The article explores the gothic motifs of the film series from the perspective of the work of Jacques Derrida. It argues that Fulci establishes a unique and highly stylized neo-gothic vision in his ‘trilogy’ that reflects a hauntological ethos, and effectively a distinctively Derridean evocation of the gothic, but with a sustained focus upon Derrida's deconstructive concept of ‘Undecidability.’ In the Gates of Hell trilogy the idea of undecidability is a persistent and compelling subject actively woven into the narratives through the gothic elements that infuse their extreme violence, the supernatural, the irrational, and the frequently surreal cinematic visions that Fulci conjures.

Women and Haunted Houses in the Films of Jaume Balagueró: The Nightmares of Presence

Jaume Balaguero has developed a successful resume of horror films that show a decided preference for the classic Gothic motif of the haunted house and the Gothic heroine who investigates its interi...

Du détail décoratif au tableau pittoresque : la reconstruction de l’architecture gothique dans les romans d’Ann Radcliffe

According to Maurice Lévy, a Gothic novel is “Gothic” because its writing is closely related to architecture, the story being the very dramatization of a building. The ruined Gothic castle, abbey or monastery is indeed a cliché of the genre, the prerequisite decor for any real action to happen. The aim of this paper is to explore the aesthetic dimension of Gothic architecture in Ann Radcliffe’s novels, especially its pictorial and visual effects, from decorative emblematic details that stamp a building as “Gothic” to the creation of picturesque “tableaux” composed as true “paintings in words”. This literary reconstruction of Gothic architecture echoes the reappropriation of Gothic forms by the Gothic Revival. Radcliffe transfers this ornamental Gothic into the realm of the novel, adapting the ancient style of the “Goths” to modern dramatic purposes. Characteristic Gothic motifs such as the painted window or the arch are used to create a sense of dread or reproduce compositional effects. Drawing on pictorial models and the picturesque qualities attributed to Gothic architecture, Radcliffe’s descriptions generate “pictures”, literary equivalents of the “Landscapes with [Gothic] Ruins” popular in her days. Finally, by inserting Rosa-like banditti into architectural settings, the novelist fuses the Gothic Revival in architecture with a subgenre then popular in painting, to compose her own Gothic “Landscapes with Banditti”.

In search of a Tropical Gothic in Australian visual arts

The field of Gothic Studies concentrates almost exclusively on literature, cinema and popular culture. While Gothic themes in the visual arts of the Romantic period are well documented, and there is sporadic discussion about the re-emergence of the Gothic in contemporary visual arts, there is little to be found that addresses the Gothic in northern or tropical Australia. A broad review of largely European visual arts in tropical Australia reveals that Gothic themes and motifs tend to centre on aspects of the landscape. During Australia’s early colonial period, the northern landscape is portrayed as a place of uncanny astonishment. An Australian Tropical Gothic re-appears for early modernists as a desolate landscape that embodies a mythology of peril, tragedy and despair. Finally, for a new wave of contemporary artists, including some significant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, Gothic motifs emerge to animate tropical landscapes and draw attention to issues of environmental degradation and the dispossession of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.