Introduction: The Supernatural between Fact and Fiction, from the Gothic to the Fin de Siècle (original) (raw)
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The Supernatural between Fact and Fiction, from the Gothic to the Fin de Siècle
English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts, 2020
1. The Invention of the Gothic and its Ambivalences. 2. The (Partial) Domestication of the Supernatural. 3. The Persistence of the Gothic in the Early Nineteenth Century. 4. The Supernatural in a Disenchanted World. 5. Coda: Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment through Fact and Fiction.
The Paradox of Horror: The Dark Side of Gothic Aesthetics
The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, 2012
TellTale Deaths and Monstrous Quests: Being Human and 179 Visions of Death in Millennial Gothic Fictions Jacqueline de Giacomo 'Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!'-Bram Stoker In May of 2010, a group of scholars with various academic backgrounds from all corners of the world met in Prague to discuss the Gothic, including its sub-genres and expanding definitions. It was the first global conference of its kind and it brought about a number of interesting submissions which have consequently added to the body of knowledge and understanding perceived to be 'Gothic.' Within this eBook you will find a representative sample of the work that was presented then. Since the 1960's 'the Gothic' has increasingly interested academics. As a genre, it remains difficult to define, since the term is constantly expanding to include areas of film, music, fashion and other factions of popular culture. Both Gothic's history and its current status show the flexibility of applying the term in a variety of media. Gothic literature developed as a branch of Romanticism in the 18 th century, coinciding with both the social dislocations caused by industrial revolution and an increasing emphasis on science and reason that questioned the role of God in the world. This shifting of the ground beneath society led to an ontological questioning that gave rise to a general unease and in doing so, the first defining feature of the Gothic was born, it being that the Gothic arises at times of societal upheaval or threat. Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Lewis's The Monk, and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian are early examples of the Gothic novel. One could say, that from this point onwards, the Gothic crystallised into a form that, at its heart, was an expression of fear or anxiety at man's place in the world. Of course fear can be expressed in many ways; as the Gothic novel grew in popularity, so did many of the ways in which it expressed human fears and anxieties. Very quickly these expressions became common place within Gothic literature and changed into what can be described as recognisable conventions-a brooding atmosphere of fear, female oppression, corrupt aristocrats, family decay, immurement, journeys in weird and exotic locations, old buildings, graveyards, deviant clergy (particularly Catholic clergy)-all of these expressions of anxiety within the human psyche. Today 'the Gothic' is much more than a set of the late eighteenth-century tropes. It has expanded into all aspects of popular culture, cinema, fashion, music, and even since the 1980s, as the manifestation of the new and at times maligned 'Goth' culture. These essays demonstrate the sheer diversity of subject matter on which the Gothic now touches. In addition to the prerequisite musings on Vampires, Demons and the Supernatural, you will find more exotic examples of the Gothic, which range from the fashion of Gothic Lolitas in Hong Kong, to insightful comments on cult classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to comparisons of Gothic music of the 1980s with classic Gothic literature and film. Introduction __________________________________________________________________ viii Part one of this volume sets the stage for the conference with an exploration of the different features within Gothic literature. Maria Lima examines Gothic aesthetics in their darker forms. Lima's paper argues that Gothic aesthetics may mask more perverse influences which each one of us can, at times, possess. Jean-Baptiste Dussert examines different articulations of the Gothic tradition through the lens of the American Gothic. Starting with the novel Wieland (1798) by Charles B. Brown, Dussert traces the transposition of the Gothic aesthetic into the American wilderness. Dussert argues that this transposition is one of the contributing factors to the growth of the transcendentalist movement. Cornelia Lippert explores Gothic themes such as liminality, moral choice and rites of passage in Stephen King's post-apocalyptic novel, The Stand (1978). In particular, Lippert compares King's villain, Randall Flagg, to the traditional Gothic villain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Eoghain Hamilton explores Gothic features in a Gaelic context in the short story and minor vampire classic 'Ken's Mystery' (1887). Hamilton's paper also examines the Gothic features of 'Ken's Mystery' through a post-colonial lens. In this respect, his paper identifies a new and interesting portrayal of Irish identity that is a refreshing antidote to nineteenth century stereotypical depictions of the Irish. Finally, in part one, Angela Fodale explores the gothic elements in Haendel's opera Ariodante (1735). Fodale argues that Ariodante written and performed almost 30 years before Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), can be read as an earlier example of gothic novel. Part two examines representations of the Gothic in cinema. Niall O'Donnell compares representations of NorthWestern European identity as contrasted with Southern and Eastern European identities (as well as nationalities from further afield) in the Gothic literature of the late 18th century and classic Hollywood horror cinema of the 1930s. His comparison is notable for its interpretation of early 1930s horror cinema including such works as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932). Armando Rotondi looks at the effect of classic Gothic cinema on the highly entertaining and humorous Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Rotondi particularly investigates the influence of James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932) on the creation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Gord Barentsen explores the shattering tension of adolescent sexuality in William Friedkin's film The Exorcist (1973). In his paper, Barentsen focuses his attention on the demon 'Pazuzu' and his role in the character Regan's possession in an attempt to shed light on the shattering nature of demonic sexuality constituting the hermeneutic core of The Exorcist. Dagmara Zając continues the examination of Gothic cinema when she investigates the perils of over interpretation of onscreen horrors. Zając argues that the films which primarily should be considered and analysed as Gothic are the early Hollywood horror classics. Accordingly, Zając's paper attempts at identifying the parallels and connections between early Gothic literature and the Gothic cinema of 1930s.
University of Hertfordshire, 8‒10 April 2021 As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’ and ‘and favour those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject’. Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), talks of ‘the loves of Theseus and Hippolyta combined with the Gothic mythology of fairies’. ‘Horror’ and ‘terror’ are key terms of affect in Gothic criticism; Townsend urges us, however, to move away from this dichotomy. While we are certainly interested in the darker aspects of fairies and the fear they may induce, this conference also welcomes attention to that aspect of Gothic that invokes wonder and enchantment.
Victorian Gothic Materialism: Realizing the Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
2013
This project begins by asking why so many realist novels of the Victorian period also exhibit tropes borrowed from the eighteenth-century gothic romance-its locales, characters, and thematics. While theorizations of realism and of the gothic are plentiful, most studies consider them to be essentially opposed, and so few attempts have been made to explain why they frequently coexist within the same work or what each figural mode might lend to the other. This dissertation addresses this deficit by arguing that gothic hauntings interpolated into realist fictions figure socioeconomic traumas, the result of uneasy, uneven historical change. Realism's disinterested, empiricist epistemology made it ideal for examining relationships between individuals and social processes, especially the marketplace and public institutions against and through which the modern subject is defined. The gothic's emphases on hidden forces and motives, therefore, became the ideal vehicle for novelists to express anxieties surrounding the operation of these social and economic processes, especially the fear that they are somehow rigged or malevolent. The gothic mode is by definition historiographical, and its haunting returns stage conflicts between the values of a despotic past and those of an ostensibly enlightened present. Realism, often understood as the investigation of social reality, also develops v within its narrative a causal model of history. This is required for the sequence of events it narrates to be understandable in their proper contexts and indeed for whole meaning(s) to emerge out of the sum of disparate incidents depicted. Gothic materialist texts, therefore, are obsessed with time and its changes and especially how aspects of competing forms of bureaucracy and modes of capital and exchange determine and confront the modern subject.
Agency and the Supernatural in the Late Victorian Gothic Tales
2021
This thesis will analyse the notion of agency and its relation to the supernatural elements in Gothic short stories “Dionea” (1890) by Vernon Lee and “Lot No. 249” (1892) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The aim of the thesis is to examine the agency of the characters and the way that the supernatural is used to portray it in these late Victorian gothic tales. The analysis shall be carried out through a close reading of the short stories, followed by their comparative analysis
The Role of the Supernatural in Medieval Contexts
Reflecting on the divergent approaches scholars conduct when they read and analyze literature, there are so many ways that the supernatural can be interpreted. When approaching this subject, one should consider what is supernatural about a certain situation in the text. Are there ghosts, faeries, witches and wizards? It is my observation that circumstances of the supernatural usually involve a person with a certain power. What are the motives of these characters and what are they doing that is supernatural—disappearing, levitating, using magic and casting spells? What do the operators of the supernatural in these medieval literary texts seek to gain by using their powers? According to T. McAlindon, “The simplest form of the theme demonstrate the belief that magic, false gods, and the devil are inextricably connected. The magician aims to engage the saint in supernatural display or debate, thereby hoping to humiliate him publicly, to demonstrate the impotence of his God, to trick him into apostasy or the abandonment of his (or her) chastity (McAlidon 126). These characters with supernatural attributes use their powers to their advantage, which in turn drives the narratives they are apart of. Surveying much of the popular works of the medieval period, it is safe to say that most of the works use the supernatural as a tradition. Moreover, while some may assert that a tradition such as the supernatural is the norm in medieval works, it should be noted that although common in tradition, these narratives can offer an array of different types of supernatural elements. The purpose of this composition is to analyze the use of the supernatural within a selected few of the most respected works in the treasury that is medieval literature. By linking how these works approach the theme of the supernatural, and uncovering the supernatural nuances that distinguish them, readers will better understand the role of the supernatural as they occur in medieval secular contexts.
Making Strange: Teaching 19th-Century Gothic and Fantastic Literature
Literature and Theology, 2022
How can the teacher open what Charles Taylor describes as the 'immanent frame' of a secular self-sufficient view of reality? This article describes two modules studying non-realist literary modes-Gothic and fantasy writingwhich seek to do this. God and the Gothic reverses the psychological turn in 19th-century Gothic to examine the way Tzvetan Todorov's idea of the fantastic hesitation can be used to enable an opening to the transcendent and offers a new way of narrating Victorian Gothic through Gaskell, Oliphant, and Machen. Religion and Fantasy invokes the defamiliarising technique of Victor Shklovsky and the magic idealism of Novalis to connect German and British imaginative writing from Coleridge, through
The Gothic genre: significant contribution to literary or cultural histories?
Genres such as the Gothic have often been dismissed as having no literary or cultural value, but this is not entirely true. Critic Robert Miles has argued that ‘Gothic romances echo the cultural convulsions that increasingly racked’ the period they were written in. This is not only true for Gothic novels in general, but it gains special relevance when applied to Ann Radcliffe. Her novel, The Italian, echoes cultural anxieties such as gender issues and religious tumults, constituting a solid example of how the Gothic can make a contribution to the understanding of society. The question that should be asked, therefore, is: why has the Gothic been diminished in relation to other genres? The aim of this essay is to answer this question, and to demonstrate the true importance of the Gothic genre by analysing Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and its portrayal of religious institutions.
Gothic and the Generation of Ideas
Literature Compass, 2007
Gothic writing has remarkable generative power: as Marshall Brown has described it, gothic is a genre with what he calls a teleology, whose "significance lies in what it enabled its future readers to see, in what arguments it provoked, and. .. in what dreams it stimulated" (xix). From a brief discussion of selected early studies of the gothic, this article moves on to consider the extraordinary development of gothic criticism from the 1970s on, when the emergence of feminist and post-structuralist criticism put gothic literature on the map in a new way. Tracing the development and imbrication of the many strands of gothic criticism yields a complex and at times paradoxical picture: gothic has been read as the most rigid and formulaic of literary forms but also as centrally engaged with the notably slippery concepts of sensibility and the sublime; as escapist and as grounded in the realities of human existence; as focused on the individual psyche and as socio-cultural critique; as commenting on class, on gender, on race; as engaged with questions of national, colonial, and post-colonial identity. The field is now so well developed that guidebooks and handbooks to both primary sources and critical approaches have emerged over the last few years to codify and make it accessible. And so the question arises: have we said all that we can about this genre or can we learn still more from it? The closing portion of this article suggests that we can, pointing to gothic and religion as an area of particular interest. Religious issues have been front and center in gothic writing from its inception, and criticism to date has opened up-but hardly exhausted-this potentially rich area of research.