Gothic Past Research Articles

The Transgressive Bodies of Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens Line

This article explores the strategies employed by Dark Horse Comics to develop the Xenomorph creature and its associated universe across the publisher's Aliens line of titles. Through analysis of three Aliens miniseries’ story arcs that are representative of the line's narrative and structural innovation, my contribution explores how this corpus transgresses the parameters of the movie franchise's Science Fiction and action-horror genres in the following three ways. Firstly, I investigate the Aliens comics’ introduction of dreams and psychological trauma associated with the literary Gothic past in Aliens: Sacrifice (March–June 1993). Secondly, in keeping with the Gothic's comic turn, I examine the humorous, parodic, and self-referential elements of comics in Aliens: Stronghold (May–September 1994). Thirdly, I explore Dark Horse Comics’ critical understanding of negative nostalgia in preserving and transgressing the narrative structure and aesthetics of Alien (1979) in Aliens: Dead Orbit (April–December 2017). Ultimately, this article considers these three themes as examples of the paradoxically transgressive and restorative elements of Gothic that are apparent throughout Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens line. It argues that the ways in which the Aliens line innovatively reworks these aesthetic and narrative features of the film franchise's visual and thematic origins provide a critical understanding of the productive interactions between comics and literary Gothic traditions.

“Fast lapsing back into barbarism”: Social Evolution, the Myth of Progress and the Gothic Past in Late-Victorian Invasion and Catastrophe Fiction

While neo-barbarian dystopian futures are typically associated with contemporary popular culture, they were not, in fact, uncommon in late-Victorian popular fiction, especially in the politically charged, future-oriented popular fiction subgenres of invasion fiction and catastrophe fiction. Focusing on a representative tale from each subgenre – George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) – this article shows how they made innovative use of the gothic to show the future following a large-scale war or natural disaster as a decline back into an exaggerated version of the barbaric past. Reworking the familiar gothic trope of doomed inheritance, the tales showed nemesis occurring not on an individual or familial level, but on an extensive societal scale in keeping with their sweeping narratives of mass death and its aftermath. In presenting a post-catastrophe relapse to barbarism, the tales were extrapolating from the social evolution theories of Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot which, though delineating the forward tendency of western social progress, allowed the fearful corollary that in periods of crisis advanced societies might also regress. While popular fiction’s engagement with theories of biological degeneration has been well researched, engagements with these theories of societal reversion have received less attention. Applying them to invasion and catastrophe fiction elucidates how the tales used their regressive futures to warn hubristic nineteenth-century modernity about its potential comeuppance if it continued to either aggressively militarise or unthinkingly exploit the non-human world, two major negative social tendencies which were the source of considerable contemporary anxiety.

The Goths of Cervantes

The present work aims to trace a panoramic view of the presence and function of Visigothic elements in Cervantes’ work. The article pays attention to appearances of Gothic characters and episodes in theatre (La Numancia), the Quijote and poetry, which is crucial to examine the evocation of Spain’s Gothic past in the Persiles (III, 8), a passage which is meant as a minichorography that replies to Toledo’s efforts to recover its symbolical power (political and religious), in a new area of conflict with Lope and Avellaneda.

The Goths of Cervantes

The present work aims to trace a panoramic view of the presence and function of Visigothic elements in Cervantes’ work. The article pays attention to appearances of Gothic characters and episodes in theatre (La Numancia), the Quijote and poetry, which is crucial to examine the evocation of Spain’s Gothic past in the Persiles (III, 8), a passage which is meant as a minichorography that replies to Toledo’s efforts to recover its symbolical power (political and religious), in a new area of conflict with Lope and Avellaneda.

Los Godos en la memoria histórica castellana del medievo

The memory of the Gothic past is an essential component of Hispanic historical conscience. It has two dimensions: one political, the other religious. Political Gothicism as an ideological tool helped legitimize the territorial expansion of Hispanic Christian kingdoms in the Middle Ages. It’s character was both dynastic and ethnic. Religious Gothicism also had two facets: the cult of saints Isidore and Ildefonso and the bases of the rights of episcopal sees, especially the primacy of Toledo. The following stages can be observed in the evolution of hispanic Gothicism: foundations (the development of dynastic Gothicism in the Asturian chronicles of the 9th century and the origins of ethnic Gothicism), maturity in the great historians of the 13th century (Lucas de Tuy, Jimenez de Rada and Alfonso X), decline in the royal chronicles of the 14th century, and finally revival in the 15th century, which was linked to the international prestige of Castile and to the role of Alonso de Cartagena as statesman and scholar.

“Covered in Blood and Dirt”: Industrial, Capital, and Cultural Crisis in Red Rock and Dracula

“Covered in Blood and Dirt”:Industrial, Capital, and Cultural Crisis in Red Rock and Dracula Christopher Bundrick (bio) Karl Marx, who was tremendously fond of the vampire as metaphor, famously wrote, “If money, according to [Marie] Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (834). Suggestive of a newly risen corpse, this is, perhaps, a subtle allusion to Marx’s even more often quoted assertion that “capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (257). Either way, this is probably the only subject on which Marx and Thomas Nelson Page’s Old South planters might agree. For them, capital—especially paper money, whose value can shift independently of the more material values of practical commodities—is a kind of specter. This is especially important to the way we read Dracula and Red Rock. We know that ghosts and monsters—both representive of the gothic past—should be bound in history (real or imagined), but in both novels, the fight against blood-sucking monsters (Dracula and Jonadab Leech, respectively) stands in for another more fundamental anxiety over values: that dangerous ideologies from the past might reconstitute themselves [End Page 21] and, in the process, destabilize the present. In the looming sense that monsters might emerge from the past, this is by necessity and design a discourse of blood and dirt. It might not seem, at first, that there is much to suggest a comparison between Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock (1898) and Braham Stoker’s Dracula (1897), but at their cores, both novels mourn the end of one era while trying to influence the one to come. Page’s reconstruction romance says goodbye to the Old South and attempts to shape—at least within the realm of fiction—the new place a postbellum South will occupy in the national consciousness. Stoker’s novel, similarly, seems to shrug off the final elements of Victorian sensationalism while trying to embrace the technological optimism of the twentieth century. To put it simply, in Dracula, a group of conspicuously modern figures face the specter of their gothic past before they can move into the future; the heroes of Red Rock, carefully negotiating the tight passage between continuity and progress, similarly work to generate a place for the South within the United States. What connects these texts most fundamentally, then, is their parallel response to the cultural crisis that the end of the nineteenth century was generating on either side of the Atlantic. Although Jerzy Sobieraj contends that Page’s most successful topic was “the Old South and the emergence of the new,” his reading of Red Rock does not simply recount the stock narrative of postbellum regional strife (81). “The fact that, after the Civil War, the traditional agrarian South started being bombarded with the new industrial ideas was due not only to the Northern victors. The social and economic changes that threatened the agrarian South,” he argues, “characterized the whole of late nineteenth-century society” (Sobieraj 81). In this, he echoes the sentiments of Dr. Cary, who warns a group of overconfident young men who cannot believe secession will actually lead to war, asking “No war? We are at war at this time—with the greatest power on earth: the power of universal progress. It is not the North that we shall have to fight, but the whole world” (31). This threat to traditional nineteenth-century southern culture lets Page frame an approach to Reconstruction that might allow readers to focus less on the historical particulars of slavery and secession and more on the discursive structures they reveal. Although Earl Bargainnier’s point that Red Rock is both “a novel of sectional reconciliation” aimed at attracting readers from outside the South as well as an attempt to create “a myth of what [Page] considered a great lost civilization” acknowledges Page’s ambivalence about the [End Page 22] Old South, the key to understanding the novel’s approach to these issues is its treatment of blood and dirt as essential signifiers...

Improvement and Repair: Architecture, Romance and the Politics of Gothic, 1790-1817

This article seeks to provide a politically nuanced reading of the treatment of acts of architectural modification in a selection of late 18th- and early 19th-century Gothic fictions. Reading scenes of Gothic architectural restoration as they are figured in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791); T. J. Horsley Curties’Ancient Records, Or, The Abbey of Saint Oswythe (1801); and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) alongside contemporary architectural debates, the argument pays particular attention to the extended cultural interchange between architect James Wyatt and Antiquarian John Carter, published in the Gentlemen’s Magazine between the years 1797 and 1817, concerning the architectural and political ‘improvement’ of the legacy of the English nation’s ancient Gothic past. Having considered the metaphors of architectural improvement, repair, restoration and demolition as they are appropriated in the political writings of Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Thelwall and Hannah More during the 1790s, the article seeks to assess, via a reading of their architectural concerns, the various attitudes towards the Gothic past staged and negotiated in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

GOTHIC HISTORY AND CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE WORKS OF CHARLES DODD (1672–1743)

ABSTRACTThe clergyman-scholar Charles Dodd used the study of the past to articulate a defence of the English Catholic community that enjoyed a rich legacy. His Church history proclaimed a vision of Catholic patriotism that appealed to the influence of medieval and Reformation history on contemporary religious debates, and informed the later push for civil emancipation. Dodd's work brought together two fashionable but seemingly contrary, historical sensibilities: grounded upon antiquarian recoveries of the gothic past, but shaped by a cosmopolitan spirit of ‘reason’ that drew upon continental reformist schools. Challenging the narratives forged through the Reformation, he pitched his works across a wide spectrum of English scholarly life, seeking dialogue with high-churchmen, constitutionalists, and supporters of religious toleration. But Dodd's later reputation as a herald of Catholic Enlightenment belied the controversies roused in his career. In delivering his view of history, Dodd was forced to suppress radical thoughts on the nature of English monarchy, stumbled into conflicts with fellow clergymen, and risked the taint of heresy with reflections upon the Holy See. Conceived to construct a new intellectual platform for his co-religionists within their national community, his works served inadvertently to reveal the complexity and fragility of English Catholic life.

The Noah Confessions (review)

Reviewed by: Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story Deborah Stevenson Hahn, Mary Downing Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story. Clarion, 2007187p ISBN 0-618-66545-5$16.00 Ad Gr. 4-6 Expecting a car for her sixteenth birthday, Lynne is disappointed when all she gets is a battered old charm bracelet that once belonged to her deceased mom. By way of explanation, her father also gives her a long letter that Lynne's then sixteen-year-old mother wrote to a boy named Noah, which plunges Lynne into her parents' Southern Gothic past, a past utterly alien from the posh L.A. lifestyle she has always enjoyed. She learns that her mother's father was a social climber, an arsonist, and a murderer, and that her parents' first connection was through the tragic disappearance of the initial owner of her birthday bracelet—a wild young girl, a cousin of Lynne's father's, who babysat for Lynne's mother and got too close to her grandfather's secrets. She also learns how her father tried unsuccessfully to rescue her mother from her circumstances, but he was only able to give her the courage to eventually break away from a past that threatened to engulf her in a cycle of lies and denial. Indeed, Hall depends overmuch on the crazy Southern woman motif—Lynne's two grandmothers and one great grandmother all succumb to some form of insanity—but the train wreck of their past is too fascinating to look away from. Lynne's response to the revelations is random yet dramatically appropriate for an L.A. girl suddenly confronted with ghosts that threaten her genetic stability; she tests her own mettle against the sea and ends up nearly drowning in a surfing accident. Her near-death experience brings her into contact with her mother, who offers some affirmations on how she should live that empower Lynne to help her dad lay his own ghosts to rest. The life-affirming ending thus balances the bone-chilling melodrama of dark family secrets; fans of Carol Plum-Ucci will appreciate this dramatic and emotional story. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature by George Elliott Clarke (review)

482 Reviews consumer society is not a meaningless, disempowering culture of zombified mall rats and couch potatoes, but it is not a euphoric zone of limitless pleasure, choice, and free expression either. His book carefully charts a sensible, considered path between the two. One of the most profitable insights he has to offeris that the vampire as metaphor foryouth consumption is always inherently double, simultaneously offeringexploita? tion and empowerment. This queasy ambiguity suggestively enables, for example, a complex reading of vampire-oriented subcultures. Vampire wannabes are perhaps neither as subversive as they would like to be nor as deluded as some others would like to think them. Latham is at his best when writing about vampires. Consuming Youth is refreshingly free ofthe psychoanalytic cliche favouredby much criticism ofthe Gothic, rigorously pursuing social and economic contextualization. Latham's readings of Martin, The Lost Boys, and Rice's Vampire Chronicles contribute something new to a rapidly expanding field, by stressing the economic context of the films and the youthful figures they offerup for consumption. Discussion of Coupland's Microserfs and other 'NGener ' texts seems less rewarding, perhaps because Coupland himself is already a self-aware and critically articulate writer. The relative obscurity (at least to nonAmerican or non-fan audiences) of many of the encyclopaedic range of genre texts he discusses may also limit the appeal of certain sections of the book to all but the most dedicated connoisseurs of popular culture. As a whole, however, Consuming Youth possesses the merit of saying what in retrospect seems quite obvious, but which none the less has never previously been said. Vampires and cyborgs, the undead and the human machine, are not as far apart as their temporal locations in Gothic past and Science Fiction future might indicate. They share the same logic: figures who consume , serially offered up for our eager consumption. University of Reading Catherine Spooner OdysseysHome: MappingAfrican-CanadianLiterature. By George Elliott Clarke. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xii + 491 pp. $85; ?60 (pbk $35-95; ?22.50). ISBN 0-8020-4376-3 (pbk 0-80208191 -6). George Elliott Clarke's poetry and plays are formally traditional but lyrical and searching. They appeal to a wide range of readers, including the 'I-may-not-knowmuch -about-poetry-but-I-know-what-I-like' crowd. Still, their content is never si? milarly comfortable, as they explore many aspects of race in Canada, including histor? ical. Canadians tend to see racism as an American problem, something that never hap? pens here. Clarke makes itclear that itdid happen here and itcontinues to happen here. This might seem like a radical agenda. Yet Clarke is an admitted conservative. He refuses to dismiss the past, especially the Black Loyalists of the late eighteenth cen? tury,those persons of African descent who chose to avoid the American revolution by moving to what would become Canada. Then there was a second immigration through the Underground Railroad, the American slaves who fled to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Some black Canadians would prefer to see these people as simply victims, who said and did little except suffer.For many black Canadians, an active 'black Canada' begins with the post-war Caribbean immigration. Instead, Clarke, in both his creative and his academic work, constantly returns to his antecedents. In his scholarly articles he also returns to what they said and wrote. As he notes, they might have been seeking freedom but they were far from libertarian . In both religion and politics they rejected American individualism and sought something like what Canadians tend to call 'red toryism', a socially concerned look to MLRy 99.2, 2004 483 past values. The bible of this philosophy is George Grant's Lamentfor a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), to which Clarke himself often refers. As Grant and others have noted, while American individuals were trying to break past the frontier,Canadian communities were seeking a world of mutual responsibility. Clarke pursues this argument in many directions in Odysseys Home. The figure in the title suggests some complexities. Is a black Canadian ever 'home'? Clarke has coined the term Africadian' to claim a home...

Political Ruins: Gothic Sham Ruins and the '45

Many Gothic sham ruins erected after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 were produced as attacks on England's Catholic and baronial past. Such ruins were not simply images of picturesque beauty or of nostalgia: rather, they were monuments of ridicule and images of just destruction, commemorating the defeat of Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, by the forces of George II. The Young Pretender threatened England with the return of monasteries, the return of the tyranny of John and Charles I, and the return to the power of the pope in England. The one thing that many eighteenth-century Englishmen did not want was a genuine return to the Gothic past; such a return threatened to extinguish much that eighteenth-century Whiggism had accomplished. The Gothic sham ruins discussed in this essay were the product not of a deep sense of cultural respect, but, in fact, for some, of a sense of cultural opposition. Politics and religion help us to understand why Sanderson Miller, George Lyttelton, Lord Hardwicke, and William Shenstone built Gothic ruins. Distrust for things Gothic spread far beyond these four men: It extended from Horace Walpole at mid-century to William Gilpin at the end of the century, from the century's greatest leader of the Gothic Revival to the century's greatest promoter of the picturesque aesthetic.

The Baronial Context of the English Civil War

WHEN rebellion broke out in England in 1642, the political nation had been, for over a decade, obsessed with medieval precedent and its gothic past. Practices and institutions which had seemed defunct revived, during the 1630s, into new and sometimes controversial life. Trial by combat was reintroduced in appeal of treason in 1631, and confirmed by the judges in 1637 as a legitimate legal procedure even in disputes of property; in 1636 a bishop was appointed to the Lord Treasurership for the first time since the reign of Edward IV; in 1639 England went to war without the summons of a Parliament for the first time since 1323; and the following year the Great Council of Peers met, for the first time since the reign of Henry VIII, to deal with a revolt of the Scottish nobility. At Court, the king was encouraging a gentleman of his Privy Chamber, Sir Francis Biondi, in his labours on a massive survey of the baronial struggles in England from Richard II to Henry VII—a work which, when it appeared in 1641 asThe Civill Warres of England, was shortly to be endowed with a profoundly ironic topicality.