Gothic Fiction Research Articles

Gótico brasileño: el cine de Walter Hugo Khouri y José Mojica Marins

This paper seeks to connect the concepts of “terror” and “horror” proposed by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe to films by Brazilian directors Walter Hugo Khouri and José Mojica Marins. It will be discussed here how such concepts manifest themselves in the national context and in which senses, trapped somewhere between repetition and difference, Khouri and Mojica’s films can be deemed expressions of a Brazilian Gothic. Stemming from elements derived from Anglo-American criticism, but, highlighting the different meanings that these elements gain in Brazil. To interpret Brazilian films in the light of the Gothic means addressing the issue of “construction of meaning” in national history, as the Gothic has the potential to revive old traumas and generate discussions about specific social contexts.

Radio Drama Takeover 3: Vampirella

Angela Carter wrote Vampirella, her first of five works for radio, in 1976. The play serves as a sequel to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) where the vampire’s final descendent is a countess trapped in a castle, whose mythology is pitted against the rational thought of the early twentieth century. Gothic horror (and also much of Carter’s work) is often concerned with the violation and deconstruction of bodies. In this essay I explore how Carter uses the radio’s existing deconstruction of bodies to evoke something surprisingly visceral.

Uncanny Stories for Canny Readers: The Explained Supernatural, the Villainous Doctor and Reader Expectations in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Short Gothic Fiction

ABSTRACT This article discusses how the short stories “Dr. Carrick” (1878) and “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896), by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, intervene in cultural debates about the role and reputation of the Victorian doctor. By playing with reader expectations in relation to the Gothic genre and the figure of the quack doctor, Braddon warns her readers not to unthinkingly trust their physicians. Through an analysis of how Braddon approaches this topic, the article also explores how she perceives and caters for her readership. In both stories, Braddon employs a recurrent narrative strategy – the raising and then dismissing of possibilities – in order to demonise the doctor. This contributes to an agenda of encouraging perceptive reading and a resistance to taking things at face value, and shows that Braddon is writing for readers who are experienced in terms of the popular fiction that they consume. To fully appreciate these stories and their message about medical men, readers must have the capacity to pick up on, and imaginatively follow, the potential plotlines that Braddon creates, even as she shuts them down again.

Черно-белые ужасы: американская готика. Рецензия. (Lennhardt C. Savage Horrors. The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020. 286 p.)

The monograph by Corinna Lenhardt (b. 1982) Savage Horrors: The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic (2020) studies the problems of race, ethnicity, gender, genre and history of literature. The research is focused primarily on the American Gothic literature. Corinna Lenhardt argues that racialization is intrinsic and natural for all Gothic literature. The researcher also introduces the concept of gotheme and argues that literary Gothic is based on the unique binary opposition "savage villain / civil hero", proving this thesis on the material of the analyzed Gothic novels. The author highlights a long and destructive impact of Gothic racialization on cultural discourse in the United States, as well as Afro-American resistance to the status quo in the American Gothic literature. Corinna Lenhardt thoroughly studies early British Gothic novels, as well as WASP and African-American Gothic literature from the XVIII century to the present time.

Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny by Valeria Sobol

Reviewed by: Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny by Valeria Sobol Anna Cavazzoni (bio) Valeria Sobol, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 198 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-50595. Valeria Sobol's book applies a colonial lens to analyze gothic motives in the Russian-language literature of the nineteenth century. While the English gothic has been studied from a postcolonial perspective, Haunted Empire pioneers this approach in the Russian imperial context.1 The book's greatest contribution is its framing of postcolonial analysis in the category of the imperial uncanny that serves a double role. It captures both the complexity of the imperial identity's construction and the anxiety caused by the encounter with the colonized other. Analyzing several literary works from the pre-Romantic and Romantic periods, Sobol reconstructs a certain pattern in narratives about two regions: the Baltics including Finland, and Ukraine. Accordingly, the book is divided into two parts, "The North" and "The South," of three chapters each. Other imperial [End Page 299] regions, such as the Caucasus and Siberia, remain beyond the scope of Sobol's study. The book starts by explicating the meaning of the imperial uncanny using the example of Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. In the provincial town of Taman, the main character Pechorin meets a blind child who answers him only in Ukrainian. Characterized by Sobol as one of the most disturbing scenes in the entire novel, it exemplifies the imperial uncanny as the feeling of instability and the threatening ambiguity of the Russian imperial space. Lermontov employs many elements of the gothic mode to express this anxiety. The gothic and historicism were used together to construct the empire's colonial identity. There was a direct connection between remote time and exotic places as the chronotope of these novels. As English gothic constructed Southern Europe as both a timeless and barbaric place, Russian gothic was eradicating the history of recently annexed lands to justify imperial expansion as a civilizing mission. Accordingly, one of the discourses used by the Russian Empire to justify its expansion was historical. It argued that the annexed territory was inhabited either by people kindred to the Russians, such as the Finns, or by a separated branch of the Russians, as in the case of the Ukrainians. The second discourse was geographical contiguity, which was especially popular in justifying Russia's eastward expansion. The third discourse was the civilizing mission, which was rarely applied to Russia's European acquisitions. The categories of the North and South that divide the book into two parts reflect the mental mapping of the Enlightenment that still dominated the European symbolical geography of the period the same way that West and East structure our political geography today. As Larry Wolff reminded readers in his Inventing Eastern Europe, the South–North nexus dated back to the Renaissance division between the culturally rich South and the barbaric North, which had its origins in Tacitus's Germania. The Enlightenment reversed the cultural poles of the continent by proclaiming the superiority of the North. Subsequently, the locus of historical backwardness and barbarism was associated with the East to produce the familiar opposition of West and East.2 Russia was historically associated with the North, and the gothic novels of the nineteenth century embraced this symbolical geography. The North is essential for the gothic genre focused on medieval [End Page 300] Europe, and Livonian ruins and castles provided a perfect setting for Russian gothic novels. There was also an ideological advantage in exploiting the Livonian past. Associated with German domination, it allowed the Russian conquest to be presented as bringing the light of reason to a place that had been held in medieval darkness by its former overlords. Besides, the local populations were considered as historically linked to the Slavs. The Decembrist writers, such as Nikolai Bestuzhev and Vil'gel'm Kiukhel'beker (Wilhelm Küchelbecker), explored the Livonian theme for their political agenda. Decembrists approved of the series of reforms carried out by the imperial government in the Baltic provinces that emancipated serfs...

Poe’s “Metzengerstein” – Untangling the Skeins

Poe’s “Metzengerstein” stands in a class of its own. It is first and foremost, a Gothic tale but, at the same time, it is much more as well. The Gothic mores embedded in the narrative are open to all the usual interpretations associated with Gothicism. Fear induced by the uncanny in the Freudian sense of unheimliche is an integral part of the text under consideration. What makes this tale special is the fact that the Gothic conventions have been used as an allegory for the decline and disintegration but ultimate vindication of creative imagination. The contemporary commodification of literature makes a writer’s journey a tight ropewalk as he traverses the precarious path marked by the breakdown of ‘Imagination’ in the Coleridgean sense of the term but culminating in its definitive exoneration. Viewed from a modern standpoint, “Metzengerstein” can be looked upon as a projection of Poe’s own fears and desires. It is also a repository of our apprehensions of being a ‘Doppleganger’.

The Roads Round Pisa by Karen Blixen — a play with a plot and a form

The article focuses on specific structural features of tales written by Karen Blixen, now considered to be the main Danish writer of the 20th century. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in English in 1934. The Roads Round Pisa and other tales from this book are not only full of symbols and metaphors, but also have complex structures at the level of composition and of plot. The narration in Blixen’s writings contains intense action; it is a dramatization of the text. The concept of “theatricality” constantly exists in many her tales and it is important for the interpretation of ideas in The Roads Round Pisa: but this concept generally determines a form of the text and its composition, which has some similarity to the composition of 5-acts drama. The motive of a play becomes the important structural component in this text; it is also connected to the plot and to images. Personages in this tale play different roles and change many masks. There are two types of heroes: heroes — actors on the stage and heroes — members of audience in the tale. The motive of a play creates also a particular subtext — required for understanding hidden matters, which a plot is built on. Theatricality of a text, on the one hand, brings more complicity, diversity; clarity of perception often is lost, because there is a certain coded meaning in the narration. On the other hand, it forces a reader to search for ways to comprehend the text. It looks like a reader is involved in a play, and only if he accepts rules of this play, he can understand hidden meaning of all circumstances. Karen Blixen uses the concept of theatricality to create absolutely original narratives inherent only in her poetic manner.

АРХЕТИПЫ СТРАХА И ПРОБЛЕМА ТРАНСФОРМАЦИИ ГОТИЧЕСКОГО ХОРРОРА В СИМВОЛИСТСКОМ РОМАНЕ

The article is dedicated to the research of gothic tradition transformation in symbolist novels of Fyodor Sologub, Valery Bryusov, Andrei Bely, Aleksey Remizov, Aleksey Skaldin and others. Archetipical and symbolic images and motifs of abyss, chaos, labyrinth and circle are analyzed. They define the change of the functions of gothic horror. The study looks at the problem of representation of ritual-mythological “rite de passage”, images of “dance macabre”, visual and sound symbols that represent existential and metaphysic fear.

“Reader, unbury him with a word”: The Revenant and/as Evil in Elizabeth Kostova’s ”The Historian”

This research addresses the universal question of evil through an intertextual focus between Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a traditional Gothic production and its neo-Gothic counterpart, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Through investigating the relationship between two ensuing genres, it explores the understanding of human nature and its transformative capacity for evil in Gothic and neo-Gothic fiction, as well as protagonists’ need, temptation and failure to exorcise the Revenants of the past. With a theoretical framework supported by Jacques Derrida and his concept of hauntology, the present research further revolves around revealing how the monsters of the (neo-)Gothic fiction function as the manifestations of history itself by analysing the way the past haunts humanity’s present and future.

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others ed. by Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi

Traditions of Gothic Literature in Olshevri's "Vampires"

Traditions of Gothic Literature in Olshevri's "Vampires"

«En Ridder saa bold og en Frøken saa grand» – spøkelsesdikting i vers og på prosa

The publication of Thomas Percy’s anthology Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) not only marked a new interest in the old medieval ballads themselves, but provided contemporary writers with dramatic literary motifs. Especially erotic ghost stories became fashionable. One of the most prominent ghost story writers was Matthew Gregory Lewis. In 1796 he published what was to become one of the most influential Gothic novels at the time, The Monk, containing several ballads of Lewis’ own creation. One of these, «Alonzo the Brave», became a classic. Almost immediately it was translated to Swedish and Danish. In Sweden, the ballad about the bold warrior Alonzo and his fiance Imogine became immensely popular as a broadside ballad (skilling ballad). Later it was translated to Norwegian, where the text was shortened and in some ways simplified. It seems that the ballad collector Sophus Bugge was the first to come across the ballad in Norwegian oral tradition. This was in the 1860s, but probably the translation was made quite a few years before that. Furthermore, in some cases the ballad story was transformed to a prose tale. Especially the prose tale told by Inger Marie Fallet from Sørum is of high quality, showing that there was no unsurmountable distinction between tales in verse and prose.

The Gothic Representations of the City through the Fl?neur in Victorian Literature

The Victorian Gothic moved away from old and conventional themes and spaces of early Gothic novels such as ruined castles and evil villains into more realistic spaces and characters that went hand in hand with the issues of the era. While the conventional Gothic space centered on the castle or other forms of old buildings, the city was an important component in Victorian Gothic imagery. In an era of growing mediation between the city and the urban dwellers, the gothic representations of the urban space in Victorian literature highly depended on the 'eye' of the its fl?neurs, or walkers who see, interpret, and produce the city. The fascination with modes of perceiving and seeing the mystery of the puzzling visual experience are evident in a wide variety of the nineteenth and twentieth-century theories and researches on the urban space. The focus of this paper is to graft some insights into debate on urban visuality and other related tropes that provide a range of perspectives on the field of the visual and perception of the city. Then, drawing from Victorian novels, this paper examines Dickens’s portrayals of urban subjects such as Gothic fl?neurs who produce the city as a Gothic place.

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

<i>The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century</i>. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

All That Glittered: Britain’s Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush, by Timothy Alborn

Reviewed by: All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush by Timothy Alborn Paul Lucier (bio) All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush, by Timothy Alborn; pp. ix + 260. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, $35.00, $23.99 ebook. A quick search for the phrase "all that glitters" returns over twenty-seven million results; most everyone, it seems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to William Shakespeare and J. R. R. Tolkien to Led Zeppelin, is looking for a shiny aphorism about mistaken riches. Timothy Alborn, by contrast, is seeking a more accurate account of the cultural values that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons placed on gold, and in this bright new book he has largely found it. All That Glittered: Britain's Most Precious Metal from Adam Smith to the Gold Rush is a praiseworthy feat, as much for Alborn's methods as for his results. Over ten thousand sources were surveyed, scanned, and searched (with the assistance of ten Ph.D. students duly praised in the acknowledgments) to discover the multiple meanings of gold. The extensive inventory of digitized sources—from gothic romances, travelogues, poems, and plays to currency pamphlets, encyclopedias, newspapers, and political polemics—is remarkable and may facilitate a new way of seeing the past. Alternatively, it conjures up a word cloud representing the frequency of references to gold, a visual comparative guide to the data. By design, then, Alborn's book reflects the interests of those Britons who wrote, read, and were written about when it came to gold. What did these Britons talk about when they talked about gold? Adornment, most often, and Alborn accordingly devotes a lot of attention to how Britons viewed decorative gold. At home, Britons seemed most concerned about who could legitimately flaunt gold about their persons (servants, military officers, mayors, and, of course, members of the royal family) and why everyone else (gentlemen, tasteful women, nouveau riche) could not. Abroad, Britons regarded the wearing of gold earrings, bracelets, bells, and rings as the [End Page 596] very definition of foreign; at once exotic, picturesque, and barbaric, the gold worn abroad signaled a radically different stage of civilization, one in which such unproductive gaudiness may be tolerated, perhaps, because investment opportunities in those other countries were rare. Such interpretive flexibility was similarly on display in what Britons thought about gold in religious ornamentation. While they could criticize the gold plate, vestments, and tapestries of Catholic churches as excesses of backward devotional practices, by the 1830s conflicted Anglicans could lament the lack of decoration in their own immoderately sparse cathedrals. Britons also needed nimble reckoning to appreciate ancient coins and newly-minted medals. As emblems of the past, the former could be preserved for their historical and aesthetic value. And if some dull-witted workers dug up a medieval gold noble, antiquarians were quick to condemn them for melting it down, although that was a rather smart economic thing to do. Medals, likewise, were worth more than their bullion, and so Britons could approve their proliferation as signs of sparkling achievement and social distinction for military officers, aristocratic sportsmen, and gentlemen of science. Alborn is skilled at navigating the cultural contradictions swirling about gold; he is also artful in choosing the term coinages, an expression relatively more popular than medals, as a way to connect culture to commerce without getting lost in the details of politics or finance. And even though Alborn's book is not a monetary history, coinages provide a sort of three-part structure to his story of cultural value. Britain introduced its first milled (that is, machine-struck rather than hammered) gold coin in 1663. Nicknamed the guinea, the gold for this coin came from West Africa. Early issues of the guinea featured an elephant or an elephant and castle, the symbol of the Royal African Company, a monopoly trading in enslaved Africans and importing much of Britain's gold. In theory, the value of a guinea, one-quarter ounce of twenty-two-carat gold, equaled twenty silver shillings, but in practice, the silver coinage was so old and worn that its...

Lipski, Jakub. Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction.

Lipski, Jakub. <i>Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction</i>.

Disco Elysium as Gothic fiction

Abstract Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representational elements, particularly its emphasis on the instability of its protagonist, the sense of decline and decay conveyed through its setting, and the interconnected secret histories that are revealed through exploration. Furthermore, many of the game’s stylistic and ludic features, such as its dense description and emotive language, and its overwhelming array of options, interactions, and responses, can be understood as engagements with the uncanny and disorienting excess of the Gothic tradition. These Gothic elements manifest most frequently through the game’s attempt to represent psychological complexity within its role playing system, its depictions of urban spaces, and its approach to questions of unresolved memory and history. The presence of these Gothic features in Disco Elysium work to contest the game’s categorisation as a ‘detective role playing game.’ While the genres are closely connected, detective fiction typically follows a trajectory in which the history of the central mystery becomes progressively clearer through the accumulation of information and detail, whereas the Gothic traditionally seeks to maintain and heighten a sense of disorientation. Exploring the tension between Disco Elysium’s Gothic elements and its status as a detective game allows for a richer appreciation of the political and social commentary that emerges from both its narrative and gameplay.

Influences and Transformations: Mohsin Hamid’s Mongrelization of the West and the East in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Influences and Transformations: Mohsin Hamid’s Mongrelization of the West and the East in The Reluctant Fundamentalist Biling Chen In his conversations with various interviewers, Mohsin Hamid often uses the idea of mongrelization to express his view of identity formation in an age when migration occurs with frequency and globalization proceeds at a fast pace. “This mongrelized, migratory thing is something we all participate in […] And there are people who don’t recognize they are mongrels. But there isn’t anybody who isn’t one” (“Exit West” 36:40–37:50).1 In Hamid’s dictionary, mongrelization is a neutral word, signifying a variety of contemporary human conditions, including multicultural dissemination and influence. By his own admission, the influences he has received from reading others’ writings are countless: “I am influenced by everyone that I read. The more I like someone, the more likely I’d be influenced. I am not always aware of my influences” (“The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Mohsin Hamid in Conversation with Akhil Sharma” 49:47–49:51). Mongrelization, accordingly, not only indicates a person’s continuous becoming, but also the process of a literary work’s production. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007),2 filled with direct as well as discursive references to world literatures and religions, is a case in point. Changez, Hamid’s well-read narrator, literally mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece while revealing his ambition to emulate Jim, his boss, who owns a house in the Hamptons: “a magnificent property that made me think of The Great Gatsby” (TRF 43). Aggressive in his pursuit of the American Dream, the Pakistani transplant likens his fearless state of mind to that in “Sufi mystics and Zen masters” (TRF 13). In [End Page 511] the realm of romance, his competition with the spirit of Chris, however, feels like an inadvertent sacrilege of the Holy Communion between Erica and her late boyfriend, “a religion that would not accept me as a convert” (TRF 114). Ironically, his genuine conversion happens when the Chilean publisher Juan-Bautista, meaning John the Baptist, “baptizes” him with a story about the janissaries, prompting his journey to a newfound religion: Pakistani nationalism. After being suspected of instigating riots against the US government, the evolving postcolonial subject draws on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to express his complicated sentiment: “I have felt like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlow” (TRF 183). He cites Washington Irving’s gothic tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) as unnerving his American guest into a rude awakening that the contemporary United States of America is as indifferent to the outside world as the village of Sleepy Hollow. Other textual influences are subtler, but the evidence of these influences can still be identified in Hamid’s essays and interviews. In “Get Fit with Haruki Murakami” (Discontent 98–101), Hamid acknowledges his longterm admiration for the Japanese writer. When Jai Arjun Singh points out in his conversation with Hamid the similar mental illness suffered by Erica and Naoko, the female protagonist of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood—a Bildungsroman also inspired by The Great Gatsby—Hamid agrees: “And what I did in my book was to embody that in an American woman” (see Singh). Accordingly, it is safe to say that Hamid’s portrayal of the ill-fated love triangle has its roots in the sexual-spiritual entanglement between Toru, Naoko, and Kizuki in Norwegian Wood. In a less straightforward fashion, Hamid revealed his reading of a Hindu sacred text while responding to an audience member’s question at a book festival (“Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” 49:49). Arguably, the Hindu scripture Hamid did not name is the Bhagavad Gita (2nd century BCE), given the popularity of the story in the Indian subcontinent and the geographical proximity of Lahore, his and his protagonist’s hometown, to Kurukshetra, also known as the Land of Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna’s dialogue with his charioteer and spiritual guide, Krishna, is evoked in Changez’s conversations about the fundamental principles of Underwood Samson & Company (i.e., Uncle Sam) with his colleague, with his mentor, and even with his cab driver, whom he addresses as “a charioteer” (TRF 157). Gerard...

‘A Dismal Howling’: Formulaic Density and the Gothic Tableau

Abstract Scant attention has been paid by critics to the formulaic diction that pervades the Gothic genre. This article continues an extended experiment aiming to analyse formulaicity in one of the less-known Gothic novels. Peter Teuthold’s 1794 The Necromancer exhibits massive co-occurrence: textual units (lexemes, sounds, and both phrase and clause formations) regularly gravitate around other textual units, effectively clustering into fields. A field is defined as an open paradigm of items related by functional equivalence; the novel handles its components not as independent units but only in accordance with a ‘fielding’ principle, that is, only as paradigmatic elements which can be exchanged for or combined with other elements. Previous work has established a distinction between the formula properly so called and the formulaic pattern, defined as a construct that attracts lexical, phonological, syntactic, and connotative fields into its orbit. The article argues that ‘fielding’ operates on at least one ‘higher’ level, the level where formulaic patterns combine to shape a charged moment in the narrative – a tableau. After selecting a fragment of text and illustrating the structure of a single formulaic pattern, the article isolates each phrase or clause segment in the fragment, outlines the pattern it belongs in, and shows that over seventy-five per cent of its textual matter is demonstrably formulaic. Analysis of several other excerpts suggests that formulaic density is not homogeneous but decreases or rises at different points in the novel. A rationale for high-density segments is then sought in the ritualising nature of the tableau itself.

Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi (eds) (2021)

Review of: Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi (eds) (2021) Cardiff, Wales, UK: University of Wales Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-78683-750-9, hardback, £70 GBP eISBN 978-1-78683-751-6, e-book, £70 GBP