Gothic Stories Research Articles

Unveiling the Uncanny: A Study of Gothic Elements in Jinnistan by Ayesha Muzaffar

This research explores the gothic elements in Jinnistan by Ayesha Muzaffar. This study utilizes the theory of uncanny by Sigmund Freud as a theoretical framework. Freud explores the word play between the concept of "homely" and its opposite, leading some to associate the unheimlich with the notion of the "unfamiliar." The study also uses Catherine Belsey’s textual analysis as an analytical framework. Gothic literature is a worldwide recognized genre. Gothic stories included symbols that symbolically conveyed the inner suffering of their tortured protagonists, such as supernatural phenomenon, unsettling environments, and ruined architectural settings. In Pakistan, gothic fiction is in its emerging phase with only a few writers exploring this genre in their noteworthy writings. Ayesha Muzaffar is a notable author in realm of horror fiction. The analysis of this study focuses on how the cultural elements have influenced the elements of uncanny in Jinnistan. This study aims to get better understanding of the evolutionary progression of gothic elements within Pakistani literature.

‘The ghost I expected to see’: Vernon Lee, the Gothic, and the Spectrality of Perception

Vernon Lee considered the conventional ghost story to be in rather bad taste and, in her own Gothic fiction, evoked ghosts that are never directly apprehended, but are perceived as agential bodies nonetheless. The distinctive ghosts that Lee creates haunt by exploiting the mechanisms of perception that she studied and theorised throughout her career. I analyse Lee’s depictions of perception in three stories, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, ‘Amour Dure’, and ‘The Image’, through the lens of philosopher Alva Noë’s theory of perception as ‘a kind of skilful bodily activity’. Noë argues that we make sense of the world by using our sensorimotor knowledge – ‘a knowledge of the way sensory stimulation varies as a function of movement’. Lee’s ghosts draw on this sensorimotor knowledge of characters and readers, allowing her to convey a potentiality for agency without depicting unambiguously supernatural events. Using mirror neuron studies and cognitive readings of how works of art transport their audiences into virtual environments, I argue that this sensorimotor engagement builds up a cognisance of Lee’s haunting figures as agential bodies that occupy space, acted upon by the material world and, in turn, acting upon it. Lee used these ghosts to adopt speculative perspectives on perception and cognition more broadly, such as questioning the stability and reliability of perception, and suggesting a loss of identity involved in all acts of perception. These perspectives are excluded from her studies and essays but are explored in the fictional space that the Gothic opens up; in her gothic stories, Lee exploits the uncanny aspects of cognition, suggesting and experimenting with queerer and more speculative theories than the objective studies she also pursued could accommodate.

Trauma, Recovery and the Phantoms of History in Oates’ Carthage

Carthage is a novel published by Joyce Carol Oates in 2014. It portrays the trauma and recovery experienced by a veteran of the Iraq War through the narrative of a girl’s disappearance. Previous studies reveals that it’s connection with ancient literature and can be read as a modern gothic story. However, this study employs Caruth’s trauma theory to reveal the causes and manifestations of the protagonist’s trauma in Carthage and then utilizes Judith Herman’s theory of trauma recovery to explore how the protagonist emerges from trauma and returns to normal life. Ultimately it aims to create connections between the traumatized individual, society, and the historical past. The finding reveals that while depicting the brutality of war and individual trauma, this novel seeks to subvert and rectify historical accounts that have been marginalized or inaccurately represented by conventional historical perspectives. By showcasing the authentic traumatic experiences of these marginalized individuals, it endeavors to construct novel historical narratives.

Displaced Geographies and Uncomfortable Truths: Unveiling Anglo-Irish Silenced Past in Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House” (1891)

Abstract Irish history and literature are plagued with silenced discourses and untold stories. The discourse of dominance, which maintained the Anglo-Irish élite in their ruling position for centuries, was built on the silencing of the repression exerted on the Catholic population. Fin-de-siècle Irish literature encapsulates, and portrays, such silencing, which the Anglo-Irish exerted through their dominance and abuse of the judiciary, the religious and the political statements. Postcolonial reinterpretations of these writings have helped unveil the perceptions of Irish society at the time, and how different Irish writers attempted to criticise this corruption. Bram Stoker’s Gothic story “The Judge’s House” (1891) explores how the past, albeit silenced, always returns to haunt the present, exposing Anglo-Irish anxieties over the return of the repressed native Catholic population, simultaneously denouncing the one-sided abuse conducted by an élite. This paper explores how narrative technique is used to convey the idea of the perennial return of the unsolved, guilty past. Silence over historical past continuously actualises the unresolved conflicts of the Anglo-Irish, generating the ghosts that haunt them.

From the Gothic Castle to the Romantic Haunted House: Disbelief, Conversion, Aporia, Abjection

ABSTRACT We all acknowledge that the haunted house that saw an effulgence in Victorian English literature looks back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first text to call itself A Gothic Story in its second edition (1765), and transplants its castle replete with fragmentary ghosts, recalling that these are haunted by Walpole’s prefaces to both editions that urge readers not to believe in the medieval supernatural that underwrites his tale’s apparitions. Yet the decades that intervene between eighteenth-century Gothic and later Victorian hauntings (what we still call the Romantic era) produce only occasional haunted houses, and what appears in this vein exhibits a struggle, rooted in Otranto, over which elements of the Walpolean Gothic to convert, reject, half-employ, or half-satirize. By analyzing examples from Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and Byron’s Don Juan, this article shows that such insecurity in the Romantic haunted-house motif epitomizes the fundamental relationship of the Gothic to the Romantic. Here Gothicized houses become microcosms for abjecting the unresolved tugs-of-war among conflicting but pervasive ideologies over and against which Romantic writing strives to build its imaginative, and even its ironical, resolutions.

The Hetaera's Monster: The Sublime Mother in the Slasher Film Genre

The Journal of Popular CultureEarly View Original Article The Hetaera's Monster: The Sublime Mother in the Slasher Film Genre Charles E. Hicks, Corresponding Author Charles E. Hicks [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Charles E. Hicks, Corresponding Author Charles E. Hicks [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 22 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.13186Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Arnold, Sarah. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Palgrave, 2013. Baffes, Melanie. Love, Loss, and Abjection: The Journey of New Birth in the Gospel of John. Pickwick, 2016. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Princeton UP, 1992. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism. Zone, 1991. Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton UP, 1995. Geyskens, Tomas. “ Literature as Symptomatology: Gilles Deleuze on Sacher-Masoch.” Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis, edited by Leen Bolle, Leuven UP, 2010, pp. 103– 16. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Halloween. Directed by Rob Zombie, Dimension, 2007. Halloween II. Directed by Rob Zombie, Dimension, 2009. Harrington, Erin. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Routledge, 2018. Hollinger, Karen. “ The Monsters as Woman: Two Generations of Cat People.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas UP, 2015, pp. 346– 58. Jenkins, Barbara. Eros and Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference. Routledge, 2017. Kaplan, E. Ann. “ The Case of the Missing Mother.” Feminism & Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 466– 78. Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. Routledge, 1992. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1988. Kristeva, Julia. “ Julia Kristeva.” Women Analyze Women: In France, England, and the United States, edited by Elaine Hoffman Baruch, and Lucienne J. Serrano, New York UP, 1988, pp. 129– 48. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982. Mattoon, Mary Ann. Jungian Psychology in Perspective. Free Press, 1981. Mulvey, Laura. “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism & Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 34– 47. Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind. Indiana UP, 1993. Powell, Anna. Deleuze and the Horror Film. Edinburgh UP. 2005. Red Dragon. Directed by Brett Ratner, Universal, 2002. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago UP, 2006. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York UP, 2010. Sobchack, Vivian. “ Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas UP, 2015, pp. 171– 92. Studlar, Gaylyn. In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. Illinois UP, 1988. Tarr, Clayton Carlyle. Gothic Stories Within Stories: Frame Narratives and Realism in the Genre, 1790-1900. McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017. Verhaeghe, Paul. “ Enjoyment and Impossibility: Lacan's Revision of the Oedipus Complex.” Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, edited by Justin Clements, and Russell Grigg, Duke UP, 2006, pp. 29– 49. Williams, Linda. “ When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas UP, 2015, pp. 17– 36. Wood, Robin. “ An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018a, pp. 73– 110. Wood, Robin. “ Race with the Devil.” Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, Wayne State UP, 2018b, pp. 67– 72. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Routledge, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

«Великий Паша» — заживо погребенный: о прототипах персонажей рассказа Трумена Капоте «Дерево ночи»

“A Tree of Night” is probably Truman Capote’s most terrifying piece, which, along with “Miriam”, has become his signature story. Created in 1943 and published two years later in Harper's Bazaar, this story was called a “pure distillate of terror” by reviewers. Despite the absence of the manuscript in Capote’s archive and his silence about how and when this story was written, the paper pieces together the writer’s personal circumstances during that period. Based on these data the paper makes a suggestion on when the story might have been created and identifies the archetype of the mysterious character named the Great Pasha. This information corrects a number of inaccuracies contained in Capote’s biography published by Gerald Clarke in 1988. The paper explores in detail the history of the Great Pasha — “a fakir from Egypt”, who toured American South with a bold performance “Buried Alive”. According to the hypothesis made in the article, it was the Great Pasha who met six year old Truman at his aunts’ house in Monroeville in May 1931. Twelve years later Capote drew on his memories of the Great Pasha and his assistant Madame Flozelle to create sinister characters of his Gothic story “A Tree of Night”. Thanks to the archival materials the paper managed to bring out the traits that Capote’s characters owe to their archetypes, and to reconstruct the facts of the fakir’s life. For the first time in Russia the article reproduces a unique picture featuring the Great Pasha, his assistant, and the writer’s mother Lillie Mae Faulk.

Imperial Gothic, Gender Relationship, and Transnational Contexts in Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase

Louisa May Alcott’s dexterity of writing gothic fiction has not obtained full attention. In general, her stories delve into the Victorian domesticity in the nineteenth century. Despite the success of Little Women (1869), which culminated in Alcott’s career as a domestic writer, she also had keen perceptions of the globalized world in her time. Interestingly, she used her “left hand” to write gothic stories. As she experienced severe poverty due to her father’s inability to take care of his family financially, Alcott had to write and earn the money to support her family. Her personal adversity reversely sparked her passion and talents to write gothic thrillers. Along with companionship with literary scholars such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she acutely understood her then-contemporary political and cultural issues along with her trips in Europe. Especially, Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866) delved into the social aspects of America’s growth, women’s elevated position after the Civil War, and her transnational view of the world are portrayed in it. In the novel, she shows her knowledge of the classical and literary allusions by using the motifs of William Shakespeare’s Tempest, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and, moreover, questions her view of gender equality and investigates the images of good and evil that represent the struggles in the Gothic tradition. Her concerns of domestic and international cultural and political affairs are fully reflected. Ultimately, A Long Fatal Love Chase addresses the national dynamics of cultural rivalry between America and countries in Europe in her then contemporary period.

Witches’ Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen’s “The Caryatids”

ABSTRACT In this essay, I use the recent convergence of queer, feminist, and ecocritical perspectives under the heading of “queer ecology” to analyse how Danish bilingual author Isak Dinesen (real name: Karen Blixen) deploys breastfeeding in her Gothic story “The Caryatids: An Unfinished Story.” Queer ecology entails critiquing the assumption (or myth) that heterosexual identities, monogamous relationships, consanguineous kinship networks, and reproductive nuclear families are better, healthier, or more “natural” than other formations. I situate Dinesen in opposition to the tradition of Enlightenment “lactivism,” whose proponents (chief among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau) celebrated exclusive maternal breastfeeding within hetero-reproductive nuclear family structures. In my reading of “The Caryatids,” I place special emphasis on three Gothic-related female characters—the incestuous wife, the adulterous mother, and the “gypsy” witch—who breastfeed queerly, knowingly or unknowingly thwarting the demand that women nurse the monogamous and patriarchal bio-family order into existence. When removed from its sanctioned familial context, I argue, the lactating breast in Dinesen’s narrative proves a disorderly signifier of errancy and dissent, pointing towards the possibility of alternative, emergent, contingent, and potentially more sustainable configurations of gender, relationship, and community.

Glamour Waves: The Gothic Story of Marilyn Monroe as Told by Joyce Carol Oates in Blonde

Glamour Waves: The Gothic Story of Marilyn Monroe as Told by Joyce Carol Oates in Blonde

Australian and New Zealand Women’s Supernatural and Gothic Stories 1880–1924: Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer

ABSTRACT There is relatively little critical work on the supernatural or Gothic stories of late nineteenth, and early twentieth century women writers from Australia and New Zealand. This essay concentrates on supernatural stories by Australian and New Zealand women writers from circa 1880 -1939 specifically Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer. Many of the terrors exposed in Australian and New Zealand Gothic and the supernatural derive from disequilibrium when immersed in confusing difference seen as foreign, or indigenous while work by women refuses the fin de siècle demonising of women’s sexuality and intertwines tales of lost children (Rosa Praed: 1851–1935) and domesticity challenged by powerful, but often ultimately punished transformation (Dulcie Deamer: 1890–1972). As women writers fascinated by and engaged in spiritualism and the occult, and as writers of the Gothic and supernatural alongside colonial, indigenous and other histories, Praed and Deamer channel the past, work with the occult, the witchy and the weird, explicitly exploring varied sexualities, foregrounding women’s experiences, challenging conformist roles for women, both themselves and their characters living alternative lifestyles. Their subject matter partly derives from both authors’ interests in spiritualism and their transiting between the Antipodes and Europe (Praed,) or New Zealand, Australia and the Far East/India (Deamer). I discuss the following stories: Rosa Praed “The Bunyip” (1891), “The Ghost Monk” (1908) “The House of Ill-Omen” (1908) and Dulcie Deamer: “As It Was in the Beginning” (1908) “Hallowe’en” (1909), “The Devil’s Ball” (1924).

Deviant Representation of Femininity in Supernatural Tales of Songling Pu and Edgar Allan Poe

This essay analyses the deviant portrayal of femininity represented in the eighteenth-century Chinese supernatural tale “The Magic Sword” (by Songling Pu) in parallel with the nineteenth-century gothic story “Ligeia” (by Edgar Allan Poe). Although the main female characters, Nie Xiaoqian and Ligeia, are cultural products generated by very different times and spaces, both offer similar descriptions of women who stray from the typical norms and expectations of a patriarchal society. In the face of such restraints, these fictional characters strive to navigate their own lives through a process of subtle negotiation and fierce resistance. Poe and Pu capitalize on the possibility of their female characters being a deviant or “supernatural” entity through the depiction of a mystic event, the “resurrection” of the two women, and thereby express their support, uncommon at the time, for female affirmation. In so doing, they also mobilize unwavering support for women’s confrontation with the patriarchal system and established social norms. Additionally, Nie and Ligeia profoundly influence the dreadful fate of the two male protagonists by guiding them to actualize their own selfhood, on the premise of achieving a female identity and thus developing their status in society. Despite the fact that they are from different cultures and ideologies, both authors demonstrate an awakening new norm of womanhood. Through their portrayal of deviant femininity, they offer a liberating power, not merely for the survival of their contemporary women, but also for modern women in our age.

"У ДРАГОВИНІ ВИЗНАЧЕНЬ ТА ЗМІН, ЯКІ НЕВТОМНО МНОЖАТЬСЯ ЯК ЦВІЛЬ У «БУДИНКУ АШЕРІВ»": АТРИБУТИВНІ ОЗНАКИ ГОРОР-ЖАНРУ

The theorizing of literary horror is characterized by constant change, and as it evolves it provides more insightful models of interpretation. As David Hartwell, one of the key theorists in the field, states in "The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror" (2001), horror has reached that point of development where we can finally appreciate its achievements. In literary criticism, scholarships devoted to the horror genre began to appear as early as the 1920s. Since then critical thought has been dealing with disagreements regarding its definition. In particular, the theory of horror operates such terms as "dark fantasy", "mystery story", "horror story", "gothic story", "story about the supernatural" and others, and they are often used as synonyms. Consequently, there is a need to clarify the definition of horror and its collocations, at least in those studies which have a theoretical component as a key one. While the definition of horror is still a matter of discussion, there is a consensus view on the genre’s key distinctive feature: creating a certain mood throughout the textual tissue. Particularly, a famous literary scholar John Cuddon claims that horror "shocks", "frightens", "induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing" (The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 2014). Douglas E. Winter concurs with this statement while affirming in his introduction to the anthology "Prime Evil" (1989) that horror is not only a genre but an emotion. Hence, it is critical to identify the ways in which the emotion of horror is constructed in composition, plot mechanics and characterization, as well as outline specific linguistic and stylistic features of horror texts. This paper deals with the theoretical aspects of horror as it aims to refine its attributive features within the interest of literary criticism. We analyzed a variety of definitions of horror across various disciplines, in diachrony and synchrony, and proposed a definition that can be appropriated in literary horror studies.

The Story of Coraline(s): A Gothic Coming of Age

This study deals with Coraline (2002), the novel by Neil Gaiman, and Coraline (2009), the animated adaptation directed by Henry Selick based on Gaiman’s book. While Gothic stories often emphasize and question human morality, children’s literature usually holds a moralizing value. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline presents a story within the genre of children’s literature that seems to be deeply rooted in the Gothic tradition. Some of the fundamental gothic elements in Coraline’s story are the presence of ghosts, grotesque beings, and the existence of a parallel and dark universe that serves as the setting for the story. Coraline deals with anxieties related with personal development, growing up, and the environments that surround her. Gothic content within both the book and the film contribute to the undermining of the idealization of Coraline’s family, her own process of growing up, and her coping with moving to a completely different place. The creation of the gothic world is exploited in both works to represent Coraline’s coming-of-age experience and her conflict with her family. However, despite Selick’s film being a faithful and well-delivered adaptation of Gaiman’s novel, there are considerable differences that affect how the audience interprets Coraline as a character and her story, which this analysis will highlight.

Coining Nonce Words: Contrastive Research Based On A Novel

Nonce words or occasionalisms are coined for a particular occasion and usually they are used just once. It is especially difficult when such newly created words have to be translated to another language. This article studies John Harding’s novel Florence & Giles and its Bulgarian translation (by Vladimir Molev). It is a sinister Gothic story told by the 12-year-old Florence living in an isolated New England mansion in 1891. She distorts words by transforming them into other parts of speech, e.g. nouns and adjectives are turned into verbs, nouns into adjectives, adverbs and prepositions into verbs, etc. At first, it could be annoying to the reader, however, once you get used to her narration, it is both fanciful and charming. This research studies the intensely concentrated nonce words in the text and their equivalents in Bulgarian from the point of view of their grammatical, word-formative and semantic characteristics. The contrastive method when applied to the parallel corpus shows some similarities and a lot of differences in the particular characteristics of nonce words due to the specifics of the two languages under discussion.

Traveller's Tales: Rudyard Kipling's Gothic Short Fiction

Between 1884 and 1936, Rudyard Kipling wrote over 300 short stories, most of which were first published in colonial and cosmopolitan periodicals before being reissued in short-story collections. This corpus contains a number of critically neglected Gothic stories that fall into four groups: stories that belong to the ghost-story tradition; stories that represent the colonial encounter through gothic tropes of horror and the uncanny but do not necessarily include any supernatural elements; stories that develop an elegiac and elliptical Gothic Modernism; and stories that make use of the First World War and its aftermath as a gothic environment. This essay evaluates Kipling's contribution to the critically neglected genre of the Gothic short story, with a focus on the stories' persistent preoccupation with spatial tropes of travel, disorientation and displacement.

Worldview in Gothic Story by E. F. Benson “Gavon’s Eve”

The issues of creating a picture of the world in the story of the English writer E. F. Benson’s “Gavon’s Eve”. It is concluded that the picture of the world is organized by two external chronotopes: the chronotope of the Scottish village of Gavon, the chronotope of the Pictish fortress and the internal chronotope, concentrated around the consciousness of the narrator. Attention is paid to the functioning of forms of artistic space and time, built on the principle of binary oppositions. It is shown that spatial correlations between external and internal, far and near, western and eastern have an increased semantic significance in the narrative. Particular attention is paid to the role of the spatial categories of up and down, revealing the author’s concept of the eternity of infernal evil. It has been proven that the key forms of artistic time are day and night, light and dark, past and present, which are traditional for Gothic subjects. The relevance of the study is due to the growing interest in the genre of gothic prose, which today is associated, in particular, with attempts to resist anti-humanistic, destructive trends in the life of modern society. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that the issues of artistry of Gothic stories by E. F. Benson is still underresearched.

An application of gothic elements in rudyard kipling's “my own true ghost story”

This paper aims to find the Gothic elements in Rudyard Kipling, selected short story. After the first reading of the short story "My own true ghost story" shows a lot of gothic elements. The analysis of this Gothic story will show how young man haunted by Dak Bungalow because of the game room, doolie bearers walking sound and dark winter night with rain-affected to the young hero of this story. In all Victorian gothic stories and novels, young protagonist characters are only suffered in the example of H G Wells story The Red Room hero suffered by Shadow and long corridors, Wuthering Heights by a young ghost with Dark Romance, haunted rooms, windows, churchyards, graveyards, vault these are common places. But in Rudyard Kipling's story My Own True Ghost stories Young British Protagonist or Narrator of this story haunted by the Bungalow take takers Kanshamas, who is old as the building, they told old stories about a British officer who visited, stayed this Dak Bungalow, and how they lived now also as a ghost and he tried to see this but that particular he fell from the steps when he opens his eye, Khansams is sitting beside him and he thought this is unanswered place.

Sisterly Charity or Sisterly Venom in Rebekah Hyneman's "The Sister of Charity"?

Rebekah Hyneman's serial novella "The Sister of Charity" (1857) gained a wide readership at the time of publication. Nevertheless, since then Hyneman's rich literary opus has been almost totally neglected. This paper aims at redressing this oversight by examining her novella, "The Sister of Charity," a tale which in addition to being a Gothic story appropriates features of the Buildungsroman, and should be studied in light of complex sisterly relationships. The examination of the cultural, political, economic and socio-historical factors, while also referring to psychoanalytic literary models, is vital for outlining the environment in which Hyneman's female protagonists were conceived. Writing the novella in a Gothic genre allowed the writer to explore the element of the double among sisters. The incidence of the double could, on the one hand, be construed as an account for the alienation of human beings and the protagonists' self-estrangement and self-destruction. On the other hand, sisterly relationships may signify the strength of siblings' bonds, allowing the sisters to counter the repressive norms of patriarchal society and to define themselves as individuals within harsh surroundings. This paper also addresses the above-mentioned ambiguity.

Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 by James Uden

Reviewed by: Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 by James Uden Giles Whiteley James Uden, Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 284. $74.00 cloth. Good scholarly books sometimes seek not only to add to what we know about any given subject, but also to radically reconfigure the supposed knowns of this subject. James Uden's Spectres of Antiquity is one such book. Founded on what initially seems like a counter-intuitive inspiration, Uden asks us to re-conceive our understanding of the origins of the Gothic as less a reaction to, than a reconfiguration of, the classical heritage. In the mode of all good Gothicists, Uden unearths the repressed kernel at the core of his subject, but in this case it is the surprising revelation that the Gothic does not seek to exorcise the "spectres" of the classics and the classical past, but rather mines and relies upon a subterranean vault of classical sources, creatively reworking them. The results of Uden's labors are striking, and it is not hyperbole to say that Spectres of Antiquity will be essential reading to all who are interested in the origins of the Gothic or to the history of classical reception in the eighteen and early nineteenth centuries. The story of the origins of the Gothic that Uden calls into question is much rehearsed. When Horace Walpole republished The Castle of Otranto in a second edition, he included a famous preface which figured the "Gothic Story" (the new subtitle) as the blending of two kinds of "romance," ancient and modern. The model for this Gothic was an English-language literary tradition of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, one which emphasized the power of "fancy," rather than the classical authors which many of Walpole's contemporaries were openly emulating. His defense of the genre was accompanied by an attack on Voltaire, who had himself recently attacked Shakespeare for violating the "classical" laws of the Aristotelian dramatic unities. Walpole's Gothic then is supposedly founded on a suppression of the "classical" laws of order, reason, and decorum, in favor of a more English or "Gothic" value of imagination. [End Page 130] In this, Walpole's version of the Gothic seemed to chime with a contemporary reappraisal of the standing of the "Gothic" during the period. His literary experiments became part of a wider politico-cultural narrative, one expressed in the factional infighting of the Whig party during the immediate period of composition, and one which had claimed the career of Walpole's father, Prime Minister Robert Walpole. According to this view, the rise of interest in Gothic art and architecture during the middle of the eighteenth century was ultimately a question of nationalism: the new Gothicists of the period discovered in their subject an imagined culture of medieval northern Europe. In a moment of ahistorical bravura, this same spirit could be traced back to the supposedly emancipatory gestures of the sackings of Rome by the Goths, and teleologically read forward both to Henry VIII's break with Rome and to the development of parliamentary democracy after the Revolution. As such, the Gothic became a quintessentially Whiggish preoccupation. If this stretched the Gothic well beyond its historical borders, it also did the same with the classical, conflating ancient Rome with the Catholic Church, and the Goths, who were broadly based in Germany, with the English. Regardless, however, of the questionable historicism of the Gothicists of the period, battle lines were supposedly drawn: it was the Gothic contra classicism. In Spectres of Antiquity, Uden not only questions this eighteenth-century historicism; he also questions the ways in which literary historians have been a little bit too quick to buy this story. Indeed, as with all good counter-narratives, closer scrutiny reveals that what initially seems extraordinary is obvious when Uden has brought the facts to light. His argument is that a clear classical presence underwrites the Gothic, one which, in many cases, has been right before the reader's eyes. For instance, under the subtitle to Otranto, Walpole positions an epigraph from Horace, as Matthew Lewis positions a different epigraph from the same...