The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.
One of the central images conjured up by the gothic novel is that of a shadowy spectre slowly rising from a mysterious abyss. In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Maggie Kilgour argues that the ghost of the gothic is now resurrected in the critical methodologies which investigate it for the revelation of buried cultural secrets. In this cogent analysis of the rise and fall of the gothic as a popular form, Kilgour juxtaposes the writings of William Godwin with Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ann Radcliffe with Matthew Lewis. She concludes with a close reading of the quintessential gothic novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. An impressive and highly original study, The Rise of the Gothic Novel is an invaluable contribution to the continuing literary debates which surround this influential genre.
George Haggerty examines the ways in which gothic fiction centers on loss as the foreclosure of homoerotic possibility and the relationship between transgressive sexual behaviors and a range of religious behaviors understood as 'Catholic'.
Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation. In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author’s ancestors, and is now in Vienna’s Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but the Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel. Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist’s perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.
This is one of Hogg's longest and also one of his most original and daring works. Gillian Hughes's uncovering of the original manuscript in the Fales Library of New York University in August 2001 allows the editors to produce here a text that reflects Hogg's original intentions. Alongside the two main plots (the supernatural located at Aikwood Castle and the chivalric located at Roxburgh Castle) a series of embedded narratives provides the reader with, amongst other things, pictures of the traditional and timeless world of rural life in which Hogg had grown up and of early Scottish history. The name Sir Walter Scott (used through most of the manuscript) is restored and passages excised from the manuscript or omitted when the printed edition was prepared are included in the editorial apparatus. In several cases Hogg's more daringly explicit language has been brought back where the printed edition has bowdlerised or subdued the expression. The restoration of the name in particular makes explicit how much this novel represents a challenge to Scott's dominance in the portrayal of chivalry and the Middle Ages in general. Any attempt to assess Hogg as a major novelist, and in particular as a major historical novelist, must consider this edition of The Three Perils of Man.
This title offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to classic British Gothic literature and the popular sub-category of the Female Gothic designed for the student reader. Works by such classic Gothic authors as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley are examined against the backdrop of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British social and political history and significant intellectual/cultural developments. Identification and interpretation of the Gothic’s variously reconfigured major motifs and conventions is provided alongside suggestions for further critical reading, a timeline of notable Gothic-related publications, and consideration of various theoretical approaches.
This book examines the ways in which the house appears in films and the modes by which it moves beyond being merely a backdrop for action. Specifically, it explores the ways that domestic spaces carry inherent connotations that filmmakers exploit to enhance meanings and pleasures within film. Rather than simply examining the representation of the house as national symbol, auteur trait, or in terms of genre, contributors study various rooms in the domestic sphere from an assortment of time periods and from a diversity of national cinemas—from interior spaces in ancient Rome to the Chinese kitchen, from the animated house to the metaphor of the armchair in film noir.
This book examines strategies of transformation (becomings, image-making, and the phantasmagoric) that figure in four stories and a novel by Gothic fiction writer Pilar Pedraza (Spain, 1951). While critics have long associated the Bildungsroman with Gothic fiction, this study takes a close look at the developmental process itself: the means by which a protagonist, young or old, might transcend a deprived status to achieve a complete sense of self. Pedraza's works imply that, regardless of the path followed, a character's ability to think differently is crucial to progress. The fixed image, representative of an inflexible, socially determined mindset, arises as an obstacle to maturation. In "Días de perros," for example, a triangular arrangement of coins in a cigar box elucidates the connection between individual lives and the social order or assemblage. Literary texts, such as this one, serve as collective assemblages of enunciation, capable of exposing fixed images as powerful instruments of control. "Tristes Ayes del Águila Mejicana" discovers fixed images among the icons of Colonial Spain's exequias reales, used in this case to territorialize the evolving identity of indigenous peoples. The territory thatPedraza's fictionbest illuminates is, in reality, the image. When images remain fixed or territorialized, they uncannily infect the assemblages over which they exert influence. Placing emphasis on images that impact women, Pedraza, in "Anfiteatro," for example, deconstructs "cat woman," which, albeit a potentially subversive image in its early manifestations, eventually ceases to empower the feminine, lashing it, rather, to a burdensome stereotype. Territorialized, the feminine must, then, break free from the image in order to discover representations more capable of illuminating present-day challenges. The phrase "dark assemblages," drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, gestures toward societal stagnation as a decisive factor in individual evolvement. Gothic fiction represents an uneven landscape, in that it tenders the possibility of a social critique yet, equally well, lends itself to the exclusion of specific identities and practices that society brands as anomalous. Pedraza's Gothic fiction is, indeed, subversive, in that it offers readers original perceptions of modern day people and the assemblages, dark or otherwise, to which they belong.
From the cutting edge to the basics The latest advances as well as the essentials of feminist literary theory are at your fingertips as soon as you open this brand-new reference work. It features-in quick and convenient form-precise definitions of important terms and concise summaries of the salient ideas of critics working in the field who have made significant contributions to feminist literary studies, and points out how a feminist perspective has affected the development of emerging ideas and intellectual practices. Every effort has been made to include as many feminist thinkers as possible. Expanded coverage of key subjects Overview entries cover topics ranging from creativity, beauty, and eroticism topornography, violence, and war, with a thorough exploration of the major theoretical points of feminist literary approaches and concerns. In addition, entries organized around literary periods and fields, such as medieval studies, Shakespeare and Romanticism survey subjects in the framework of feminist literary theory and feminist concerns. Shows how feminist ideas have shaped literary theory The Encyclopedia gathers in one place all the key words, topics, proper names, and critical terminology of feminist literary theory. Emphasis throughout is on usage in the United States and Great Britain since the l970s. Each entry is accompanied by a bibliography that is a point of departure for further research. A key advantage of this Encyclopedia is that it amasses bibliographic references for so many important and often-cited works within a single volume. Instructors especially will find this information invaluable in the preparation of course material. Special FeaturesOffers precise contemporary definitions of all important critical terms * Summarizes the salient ideas of key literary critics * Overviews cover major theoretical issues * Entries on periods and fields survey feminist contributions * Emphasizes terminology that has evolved since the l970s * Indexes proper names, subjects, key words, and related topics
Shirley Jackson and Domesticity takes on American horror writer Shirley Jackson's domestic narratives – those fictionalized in her novels and short stories as well as the ones captured in her memoirs – to explore the extraordinary and often supernatural ways domestic practices and the ecology of the home influence Jackson's storytelling. Examining various areas of homemaking – child-rearing and reproduction, housekeeping, architecture and spatiality, the housewife mythos – through the theoretical frameworks of gothic, queer, gender, supernatural, humor, and architectural studies, this collection contextualizes Jackson's archive in a Cold War framework and assesses the impact of the work of a writer seeking to question the status quo of her time and culture.
