Gothic Writers Research Articles

Melmoth and the Irish Gothic Tradition

This article explores the legacies of Melmoth, the title character of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in the context of the Irish Gothic tradition. I argue that Melmoth's corporeal monstrosity is symbolically reified in subsequent texts, and that consequently Irish Gothic fiction is both possessing of and possessed by Melmoth. Exploring this in-between space where Melmoth is re-fashioned and re-imagined, I ask what this means for the Irish Gothic tradition and the processes of reflection and self-reflection these texts enact. I therefore trace Melmoth's influence by surveying the works both of Anglo-Irish writers and of Irish Gothic writers outside this particular tradition. In particular, my argument examines tropes of doubling and mirroring in such texts so as to highlight Melmoth's presence as a symbolic and semiotic revenant.

Mythologems of english vampire fiction in Stephen Edwin King’s ‘Salem’s Lot

The article offers an interpretation of Stephen Edwin King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) in the context of how its author productively works with the elements of the ‟vampire myth” created and developed by British gothic writers of the 19th century (John William Polidori, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, etc.). The principal of these mythologems (“the depravity of the century, condensed in the figure of a vampire”; “the foreign origin of a vampire, which emphasises its otherness”; “the aristocracy of a vampire”) are successfully adapted by King in accordance with his artistic objectives, which allows the writer to include his text in a rich literary tradition, while preserving the opportunity to express his own creativity. An important artistic finding of King is the synthesis of two genre subforms of the horror novel proposed by him – a vampire novel and a small-town-horror novel: King fruitfully works with the special aesthetics of the first subform and the ideological content of the second, thus making his novel a socially engaged one and turning the plot about the appearance of vampires in New England provincial town into an allegorical narrative about the loss of moral guidelines and general spiritual degradation in America in the 1970s.

The Psychological Connection between Gothic Writers and the Genre

The Psychological Connection between Gothic Writers and the Genre

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.

SILENCE AS RESISTANCE IN THE GALO FOLK STORY OF TERI ANE: A GOTHIC PERSPECTIVE

The Gothic genre became most popular in the late 18th century with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Since then, it has been a well-established literary genre. The presence of supernaturalism, ghosts and the uncanny was always a part of literary tradition but Walpole’s novel brought new popularity to the Gothic and made it a separate literary genre. As a genre, it includes horror, terror, supernaturalism, the mysterious and the uncanny, termed a male Gothic. With time female Gothic writers also contributed to its expansion and the genre got enhanced by the addition of women's expressions of fear as well as experiences of domesticities, anxieties about the self and critique of capitalism about gender, these were later collectively termed as female Gothic, Gothic as a genre refers to a representation of silent space, a space that remains with its strength and capacity to be heard through the unuttered means of parapraxes and ellipses in discourse. The paper discusses Gothic in respect of its nature of silences as a tool of resistance through the Galo Female Gothic narrative tradition, which brings forward a magnificent tale of Teri Ane, from the Galo narrative tradition, a tale that epitomizes silence as a tool of resistance.

The Evasion of Literary History

The Evasion of Literary History

Monstrous Interiors: Quasi-Domestic Space As the Ontological Terrorist of Toxic Masculinity

Resonating with these pandemic times, Catherine Spooner has described the Gothic as a ‘malevolent virus’. In my paper, I will propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millenial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world. The narrative strand which has emerged, presents the reader with a new form of the Gothic male protagonist, whom the British psychologist R.D Laing in The Divided Self (1960), would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject. Fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. House or hotel, these ‘haunted houses’ are different from the earlier ‘hungry houses’ identified by Gothic writer Stephen Graham Jones in his introduction to Robert Marasco’s classic haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings. This new quasi-domestic space, often combining work and home, rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional Gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. His entrapment in this new Gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existential crisis beyond that of the trauma of spousal and parental failure, ultimately forcing him to confront what it is to exist in space and time. A reaction to the rise of neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity, this important strand to American Gothic embraces the multiplicity of the Gothic’s new forms and is evident in texts such as Steve Rasnic Tem’s, Deadfall Hotel, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Thomas Liggotti’s, The Town Manager, Jac Jemc’s, The Grip of It and Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters. Developing from their deeper roots in the Calvinist Gothic tradition of Hawthorne, Brockden Brown and Poe via the mid-century works of Stephen King and Robert Marasco, these new post- millennial narratives provide a space in which notions of masculine subjectivity are fundamentally challenged.

Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’: madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts.

Non-Dualism: Thanatos and Eros in Edgar Allan Poe’s Poetry

The life drive and its seemingly opposite, death drive, are inherent powers in man’s mind and psyche since the beginning of life on earth and will last for life. These powers, therefore, draw a great deal of attention in every aspect of life, the social, scientific, philosophical, and literary fields being the most prominent among them. The study is an attempt, through three sections and a conclusion, to elucidate the range of the interrelations between the two powers through several poetic works of the American gothic writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). It is supposed that for him as well, they could be complementary power drives. After critical analyses of extracts of some of his poems, the study concludes some main points, the most prominent of which is that Eros and Thanatos complete each other in many of Poe’s poems. The study used some newly disclosed up-to-date sources about the poet’s life and works to help in coming up with valuable conclusions that can help researchers who may be interested in writing about this poet’s works and poems in the future. Keywords: instinct, power, Eros, complementary, elucidate, prominent, Poe

“Hurt right down the middle, but alive and well”: African American Gothic Elements in Toni Morrison’s Home

Toni Morrison’s Home presents the story of two siblings who return to their hometown of Lotus, Georgia, after facing several traumatic episodes throughout their lives. This article aims to observe and analyze the gothic elements presented in the novel—particularly those related to Ycidra’s tale. Those elements are discussed especially in their relation to the Gothic subgenre that Maisha Wester calls African American Gothic. Methodological procedures include a brief overview of the African American Gothic and an analysis and discussion of gothic themes in Home . The results show that Morrison employs and subverts some Anglo American gothic tropes in order to contest and critique the identities imposed upon black people by white gothic writers, thus offering an important revision of the genre.

Neither Animal nor Human: An Ecogothic reading of the Monstrous Hybrid in Dracula, The Beetle and The Snake Lady

This article analyses the relationship between humans and animals, and more importantly between humans and their animality. Concretely, this project proposes an ecocritical reading of fin de siècle gothic fiction, as it provides insight on the ideological foundation of humanity’s anthropocentric relation towards the environment. Through the analysis of the gothic hybrid monster, it is possible to grasp society’s interpretation and assimilation of Darwin’s revolutionary discoveries. However, not all gothic writers assimilated the apparent artificiality of humanity’s superiority in the same way. Thus, I hereby argue that rejection and fear is not the only response to the monstrous hybrid in fin de siècle gothic fiction. On the contrary, there are also critical voices who understood this new Darwinian human-hybrid identity as an opportunity to renew human relations towards nature. Therefore, I analyse the constructions of and reactions to the hybrid monster in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle against Vernon Lee’s Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady. By doing so, I aim at revealing and ultimately challenging the main dualism that sustains the hierarchical organization of the species: the privileging of culture over nature and reason over animality. The gothic genre is indeed characterised by the blurring of boundaries. Consequently, it reveals the human as irrational, the monster as natural and culture as repression, suggesting the need for the reconstruction of human identity and its place in the world.

The Last Salvos of the Lyceum War: Poe, The Harbinger, and The Blithedale Romance

The Last Salvos of the Lyceum War: Poe, <i>The Harbinger</i>, and <i>The Blithedale Romance</i>

The Narrator's Search for her Identity in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is born on November 18, 1939, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.&#x0D; Atwood is a Canadian writer best known for her novels, which include: The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Cat's Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (1998).&#x0D; Atwood is a famous writer, and her novels are best sold all over the world. She has been labelled as a Canadian nationalist, feminist, and even a gothic writer. She is well known internationally in the USA, Europe, and Australia.&#x0D; This research aims at showing throughout Surfacing, the way Atwood portraits the narrator as a woman searching for her own identity.

Flannery O'Connor and religious epistemology

AbstractWhat are the demands of religious inquiry? It can be tempting to think of these demands in strictly epistemic terms, e.g. as a function of the inquirer's background beliefs, cognitive faculties, natural cognitive ability, intellectual skills, and intellectual character. In this article, I extrapolate an alternative model of religious inquiry from three stories by the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964). According to the model, a person's fitness for religious inquiry also depends on whether she possesses a certain moral posture. In particular, I argue that something like moral humility functions as an epistemic virtue in the theistic domain.

بحث الراوية عن هويتها في رواية مارغريت اتوود الصعود:

ولدت مارغريت اتوود اليانور في الثامن عشر من شهر تشرين الثاني من عام 1939 في مدينة أتاوا، اونتاريو في كندا. حصلت اتوود على شهادتها الدراسية الاولية من كلية فكتوريا- جامعة تورونتو، كما حصلت على شهادة الماجستير من كلية راد كليف.&#x0D; تعتبر اتوود من مشاهير الكتاب الكنديين وذلك من خلال رواياتها الشهيرة والتي تذكر منها ( المرأة الصالحة للأكل ) 1969، (الصمود) 1972، (السيدة الوحي) 1976، (الحياة قبل الأنسان) 1979، (الأذى الجسدي) 1981، (حكاية خادمة) 1985، (عين القطة) 1988، (العروس السارقة) 1993، (ألياس كريس ) 1996، ( القاتل الأعمى) 1998.&#x0D; نظراً لشهرة وذياع صيت الكاتبة اتوود، فقد بيعت روايتها في كافة انحاء العالم، كما وسمت بأنها الوطنية الكندية والداعمة للمرأة والكاتبة القوطية، كما ذاع صيتها عالمياً في الولايات المتحدة الامريكية واوروبا واستراليا.&#x0D; يهدف هذا البحث الى اظهار طريقة تصوير اتوود للروائي كأمرأة باحثة عن هويتها الخاصة وذلك من خلال (الصمود).&#x0D;

“Gothic” Elements in Seneca’s Tragedies

In the present article I discuss the remarkable fact that many of the motifs to be found in Seneca’s tragedies – such as a horrible death, a madman, an obsession or some supernatural agent – are also to be found in abundance in the work of “Gothic” authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, these motifs are now commonly considered to be the hallmark of the Gothic genre. I also analyse some of the techniques which Seneca uses in order to arouse fear and stimulate the reader’s imagination, comparing them with those used by Poe and other Gothic writers.

Mapping the Landscape with Sound: Tracking the Soundscape from Australian Colonial Gothic Literature to Australian Cinema and Australian Transcultural Cinema

This article explores how and why the Australian landscape was sonically mapped by Australian colonial Gothic writers and how these sonic descriptors came to be audibly translated into films of New Australian Cinema and, later, redeployed in Australian transcultural cinema. Australian colonial Gothic literature proved important for writers to describe and situate themselves within a foreign and uncanny landscape. The writers relied upon the sonic semantics of the Gothic genre to aurally envelop their characters within a spectral web—a world of exultant cries, piercing screams, rasping breaths, all permeating from the Australian landscape. New Australian Cinema drew on both the key sounds found in Australian Gothic fiction and the centrality of the sonic in this literary genre to tell similar stories of an uncanny Australia. By utilising three sonic conceptual tools—the sonic fetish, the sonic artefact, and the sonic spectre—and providing a close listening of Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1989) I examine how key sonic tropes from New Australian Cinema were enlisted by Australian transcultural cinema, but are silenced, manipulated, and repositioned to take on new meaning and tell very different stories of colonisation, settlement, and nation.

Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales

The article proposes a formal approach to the study of Gothic fiction, understood historically as that genre of horror literature which ran its course between the 1760s and the 1820s. The article holds that Gothic emerged and developed halfway between folklore and literature, and employed formal strategies analogous to the ‘anti‐structure’ devices that anthropologist Victor Turner detected in the liminal stage of rites of passage. It argues that a proper analysis of the genre requires a ‘thick’ description, a kind of close reading that takes into account both formal aspects and compositional conventions. Analysis shows that Gothic writers implement a number of construction strategies that can ultimately be tracked down to a set of binding ‘rules’ shaping and governing the genre. The article outlines and illustrates six such rules and argues that they provide a liminal poetics for the genre, that is, a poetics central to which stands a decisive concern with thresholds and with the ambiguities, paradoxes and dangers entailed by crossing, entering or occupying them.

Was there ever a \u201cFemale Gothic\u201d?

This article examines the reception history of women-authored Gothic texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, arguing that the generic descriptor “Female Gothic” more accurately reflects the ideological goals of second-wave feminist literary criticism than the narratives of early women Gothic writers. While several critics have attempted to destabilize the term Female Gothic, its usage persists as a short-hand form to describe narratives in which distressed female heroines are imprisoned in the domestic sphere and threatened with extortion, rape and forced marriage. This essay asks why criticism clings to an understanding of this genre as one depicting female victimization despite overwhelming textual evidence that represents a much more complicated picture of women’s use and engagement with the Gothic mode. It is argued that the answer to this question rests in looking at how Gothic women’s writing was received in the early nineteenth century and how that reception history shaped the discursive strategies of second-wave feminist literary critics.

“We Found the Witch, May We Burn Her?”: Suburban Gothic, Witch‐Hunting, and Anxiety‐Induced Conformity in Stephen King's Carrie

Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently, certain things have become unpleasant. It seems to me that thing we have to do is to separate out things that are pleasant from things that are unpleasant.Pleasantville (1998)In decades following Second World War, suburban gothic emerged as quintessential mode in which American writers chose to express myriad sociocultural concerns in an age of uncertainty. In novels of most prolific gothic writers, suburbia is habitually depicted as liminal space: Twilight Zone in which all aspects of development, whether personal or social, remain in suspended animation. vast proliferation of cookie-cutter houses and hosts of indistinguishable residents both hint at homogenization and ceaseless need to blend in -to be just like everyone else in society where going against grain is strictly prohibited. most disturbing aspect of suburban gothic, however, lies within its power to dislodge founding myth of America as of light and affirmation (Fiedler 29), generating most disquieting sense of epistemological ambivalence.Bernice M. Murphy comes close to establishing working definition of suburban gothic, describing it as a sub-genre of wider American Gothic tradition which dramatizes anxieties arising from mass urbanization of United States and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations and protagonists (Suburban 2), though this definition by no means accounts for all hefty and peculiar baggage that accompanies this type of fiction. Murphy nonetheless recognizes that suburban gothic is concerned first and foremost, with playing upon lingering suspicion that even most ordinary-looking neighborhood, or house, or family, has something to hide, and that no matter how calm and settled place looks, it is only ever moment away from dramatic (and generally sinister) incident (2), drawing attention to genre's tendency to overturn idyllic assumptions regarding American life.The problematic nature of suburban social structures becomes even more apparent when viewed in light of Mary Douglas's theories on pollution behaviors and taboo. staggering incidence of homogenization and conformity- both of which have become synonymous with expansion of suburbs-in Rod Serling's The Monsters are Due on Street (1960, Maple Street) and Stephen King's Carrie (1974), in particular, reveals deeper underlying social anxieties that plague New World. Leslie Fiedler's seminal study Love and Death in American Novel (1960), text to propose that American national narrative is quintessentially gothic one, serves as an appropriate starting point for gauging how these particular works fit into longestablished tradition of American gothic. Fiedler begins by tying American literature to nation's shadowy history and claims,Our fiction is not merely in flight from physical data of actual world, in search of (sexless and dim) ideal... it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic-a literature of and in land of light and affirmation. (29)This suggests that since its inception, American fiction has situated itself on borderlands between rigid binary oppositions such as and light, assuming kind of liminal status. effect of darkness and the grotesque infiltrating of light and affirmation is nothing short of disturbing, as it immediately unsettles America's self-mythologization as nation of and harmony (Goddu 4). It is thus no wonder that American writers have chosen suburbs, superficially very picture of hope and harmony, place where close-knit families supposedly coexist peacefully in secure environment, as setting in which to upend such myths. …