Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody
Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody

Author: Kerstin-Anja Münderlein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1000487776

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This book brings together an analysis of the theoretical connection of genre, reception, and frame theory and a practical demonstration thereof, using a set of parodies of the first wave of the Gothic novel, ranging from well-known titles such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, to little known and researched titles such as Mary Charlton’s Rosella. Münderlein traces the development of socio-political debates conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on female roles, behaviour, and subversion from the subtly subversive Gothic novel to the Gothic parody. Combining two major areas of research, literary criticism and Gothic studies, the book provides both a new take on an ongoing debate in literary criticism as well as an in-depth study of a virtually neglected aspect of Gothic studies, the Gothic parody.

Rosella, or Modern Occurrences
Rosella, or Modern Occurrences

Author: Natalie Neill

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-21

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1000888843

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Mary Charlton's 1799 Rosella, or Modern Occurrences is a fascinating novel that brokers between conservative and feminist ideas, humour and horror, and indulgence in and ridicule of sentimental tropes. Written in imitation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615) and Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Rosella belongs to a large class of comic works in which female readers and novelists are satirized. This edition not only addresses the gap in knowledge about Charlton’s work, but will be of particular interest to scholars working on the Romantic literary market of the 1790s, especially Minerva Press publications. The book engages with many of the themes explored in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, from women’s writing and female education to popular fiction and sensibility. Accompanied by a new introduction by Professor Natalie Neill, this title will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary history.

Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality
Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality

Author: Sarah Faber

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-11

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1003852963

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From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefines transgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic. Pointing the way forward in Gothic Studies, this original and nuanced combination of gendered, Ecogothic, queer, and media critical approaches addresses established and new scholars of the Gothic alike.

Nordic Terrors
Nordic Terrors

Author: Robert William Rix

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-10-01

Total Pages: 119

ISBN-13: 1839990465

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In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain’s northern heritage. In Gothic publications, Nordic superstition sometimes parallels the representations of Catholicism, allowing writers to gloat at its phantasms and delusions. Thus, runic spells, incantations, and necromantic communications (of which Norse tradition afforded many examples) could replace practices usually assigned to Catholic superstition. Yet Nordic lore did more than merely supplant hackneyed Gothic formulas; it presented readers with an alternative conception of ‘Otherness’. Nordic texts—chiefly based on the Edda and the supernatural Scandinavian ballad tradition—were seen as pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic (i.e., Germanic) peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons. The book traces the development of this Nordic Gothic, situating it within wider literary, historical, political, and cultural contexts.

Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary
Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary

Author: Shazia Sadaf

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1000936929

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As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.

Dystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction
Dystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction

Author: Wessam Elmeligi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-29

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1000925382

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Dystopia in Arabic Speculative Fiction: A Poetics of Distress unpacks the nuanced Arabic contribution to speculative fiction. Part of a larger project by Elmeligi to formulate a poetics of literary theory to read Arabic literature, this book examines Arabic dystopian fiction from the lens of social causes of psychological distress. The selected novels combine works by authors already established in studies by Western scholars and many that have not been translated before or have not received enough scholarly attention, yet. The novels represent an array of Arab countries, including Algerian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Kuwaiti, Mauritanian, Syrian, and Tunisian authors. It also highlights the contribution of women authors to Arabic speculative fiction. This book enriches the conversation about what is quite possibly a significant speculative fiction turn in the Arabic novel, as well as provides a new theoretical approach to read such complex and innovative literature.

Motherless Creations
Motherless Creations

Author: Wendy C. Nielsen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-30

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1000582418

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This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in American, British, French, and German literature before 1890 by examining motherless creations: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. These beings typify what is now called artificial life, living systems made through manufactured means. Fantasies about creating life ex-utero were built upon misconceptions about how life began, sustaining pseudoscientific beliefs about the birthing body. Physicians, inventors, and authors of literature imagined generating life without women to control the process of reproduction and generate perfect progeny. Thus, some speculative fiction before 1890 belongs to the literary genealogy of transhumanism, the belief that technology will someday transform some humans into superior, immortal beings. Female motherless creations tend to operate as sexual companions. Male ones often emerge as subaltern figures analogous to enslaved beings, illustrating that reproductive rights inform readers’ sense of who counts as human in fictions of artificial life.

Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard
Posthuman Subjectivity in the Novels of J.G. Ballard

Author: Carolyn Lau

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 100091237X

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This book proposes that Ballard’s novels extrapolate the formation of a posthuman subjectivity that is centred around an affirmative understanding of what a human body can do. This new subjectivity transforms constraints and prescribed desires into creative openings in a hyper-mediated control society that conditions docile bodies through technology and consumerism. Set in surrealist predicaments in postwar affluent Western societies, Ballard’s novels remind us of the fragile veneer of order in the familiar every day. In these moments of crisis, complacent characters are compelled to undergo a process of defamiliarisation and transformation of their understanding of the self and the body. The ability to form new relationships with the unfamiliar is imperative to survival in a hostile environment. Ballard delineates both the possibilities and obstacles of forming these relationships. In particular, the author attributes the failure to do so to the irreconcilable contradictions of late capitalism.

Lovecraft in the 21st Century
Lovecraft in the 21st Century

Author: Antonio Alcala Gonzalez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1000531651

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Lovecraft in the 21st Century assembles reflections from a wide range of perspectives on the significance of Lovecraft’s influence in contemporary times. Building on a focus centered on the Anthropocene, adaptation, and visual media, the chapters in this collection focus on the following topics: Adaptation of Lovecraft’s legacy in theater, television, film, graphic narratives, video games and game artwork The connection between the writer’s legacy and his life Reading Lovecraft in light of contemporary criticism about capitalism, the posthuman, and the Anthropocene How contemporary authors have worked through the implicit racial and sexual politics in Lovecraft’s fiction Reading Lovecraft’s fiction in light of contemporary approaches to gender and sexuality