Resources for Gothic Novels:
Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World by ISBN: 9781942954644Publication Date: 2019This collection places the fiction of Bram Stoker in relation to this life, career and status as a late Victorian. It centres on various aspects of his interests and career, such as politics, the legal system, his role as Irving's stage manager, and analyses his work in relation to these.
Dracula and the Gothic in Literature, Pop Culture, and the Arts by ISBN: 9004308067Publication Date: 2016This volume brings together fourteen articles that reappraise the productivity of Stoker’s Dracula and the strong influence it still exerts on today’s generations. The volume explores various multimodal and multimedia adaptations of the book, by critically examining its literary, cinematic, theatrical, televised and artistic versions. In so doing, it reassesses the origins, evolution, imagery, mythology, theory and criticism of Gothic fiction and of the Gothic (sub)culture. The volume is innovative in that it congregates various angles to the Gothic phenomenon, providing an overview of the interdisciplinary relationships between different cultural, artistic and creative reworkings of the Gothic in general and of Stoker’s legacy in particular.
- Killing Fear by Killing Time: Stoker's Dracula as an Epochal Conflict NarrativeAuthor: Sebastian Dümling
Published: 2016
Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the most read and most reimagined novels of the past one hundred years. Its plot has not only fueled retellings in media as far ranging as comics, popular novels, and films but also has given rise to spin-offs of multiple kinds. The narrative core of Dracula is examined here with a focus on the axes of time that collide within the novel. Bram Stoker employs the Middle Ages, available as a European narrative resource, to generate a contrast with the modern world his narrators reside in. But Stoker's references to the Middle Ages do not merely fulfill the function of creating an atmosphere of thrill, fear, and terror as former studies mostly assumed. In contrast, by drawing on Yuri Lotman's notion of semiospheres and narrative borders, I will show first how semiotically charged temporal contact zones collide and, second, how this collision allows readers to transgress two different narrated times and at the same time feel alienated by them. Through this analysis of Dracula, it is possible to postulate more generally the resource nature of medieval imaginaries as a way to encounter, or more specifically: to produce cultural otherness at all. - (M)eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker's NovelAuthor: David Del Principe
Published: 2014
I undertake a nonanthropocentric discussion of vampirism in Dracula, employing an EcoGothic approach to examine how the relation between the consumption of nonhuman flesh and blood reflects the evolving meaning of species, nation, and gender in nineteenth-century European society. I argue that flesh consumption plays an important role in the development of nutritional allegories and nonhuman vampirism. I show how Jonathan Harker's adherence, and the Count's resistance, to the dominant, meat-eating ideology destablise the carnal borderline between the species and how the distinctions between carnivorism and cannibalism trope the nonhuman and unhuman bodies as specular sites of death and horror. - Medical Gothic Masculinities in Bram Stoker’s "Dracula"Author: Ioana Baciu
Published: 2021
The present paper makes use of Michel Foucault’s theory from Discipline and Punish according to which one of the means by which women’s bodies are controlled is through their hystericization by the power-knowledge-wielding medical profession. Taking Stoker’s famous novel as a case in point, I mean to show that the men of the novel, embodiments of Reason and Empire, gathered around the guiding medical intelligence of professor Van Helsing, act upon the bodies of the vampirized women (Lucy and Mina) in a way that is the metaphorical expression of the symbolic violence perpretated against women socially. Thus, the novel is gothic in more ways than one: its much-discussed portrayal of sexually-liberated femininity through vampirization finds its counterpart in the less-approached medical masculinity, a reinforcer of masculine domination.
Book Chapters:
Reading the Vampire by ISBN: 1134895348Publication Date: 2002Insatiable bloodlust, dangerous sexualities, the horror of the undead, uncharted Trannsylvanian wildernesses, and a morbid fascination with the `other': the legend of the vampire continues to haunt popular imagination. Reading the Vampire examines the vampire in all its various manifestations and cultural meanings. Ken Gelder investigates vampire narratives in literature and in film, from early vampire stories like Sheridan Le Fanu's `lesbian vampire' tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula, the most famous vampire narrative of all, to contemporary American vampire blockbusters by Stephen King and others, the vampire chronicles of Anne Rice, `post-Ceausescu' vampire narratives, and films such as FW Murnau's Nosferatu and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Reading the Vampire embeds vampires in their cultural contexts, showing vampire narratives feeding off the anxieties and fascinations of their times: from the nineteenth century perils of tourism, issues of colonialism and national identity, and obsessions with sex and death, to the `queer' identity of the vampire or current vampiric metaphors for dangerous exchanges of bodily fluids and AIDS.
Vampires by ISBN: 9401201463Publication Date: 2006In the modern world vampires come in all forms: they can be perpetrators or victims, metaphors or monsters, scapegoats for sinfulness or mirrors of our own evil. What becomes obvious from the scope of the fifteen essays in this collection is that vampires have infiltrated just about every area of popular culture and consciousness. In fact, the way that vampires are depicted in all types of media is often a telling signifier of the fears and expectations of a culture or community and the way that it perceives itself; and others. The volume's essays offer a fascinating insight into both vampires themselves and the cultures that envisage them.
Articles:
- Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Lesbianism as a Field of Underground MemoryThis article intends to analyze the Carmilla work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu evidencing that through the narration and the memories of Laura it is possible to understand the lesbianism like space of the private one, underground memory or the trauma. We will emphasize lesbianism in the narrative as something diluted, presented now as friendship, now as admiration or aversion. Carmilla is a work still little known and does not present works that contemplate a theoretical discussion about the memory and the lesbianism existing in the narrative of Le Fanu.
- Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the MindAuthors: Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler
Published: 2005
Following the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897, vampire narratives proliferated in Britain and the US, although it was but one of several well-known vampire stories published in English during the 19th century, and scholars deem certain of the other tales to be of literary merit. Saler and Ziegler find out on what is it about the plot and the characterization of vampires in Dracula that make it the most famous example of vampires in English fiction and why in particular has it been more influential than Le Fanu's Carmilla, which preceded it in time and is of equal or perhaps greater literary distinction. - Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in "Carmilla" and "Dracula"Author: Elizabeth Signorotti
Published: 1996
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's story "Carmilla" became the basis for the better known novel "Dracula," by Bram Stoker, and an examination of the earlier story exposes the controversial themes of women's power and lesbian love affairs that Stoker attempted to control in his retelling. Stoker changes the story to make the women characters subservient to the males, and chooses to either punish women for their desire in Lucy's case, or makes them asexual helpers after they escape death, as with Mina Harker. Mina also functions as a guard between the male vampire hunters and homosexuality.
Books and Book Chapters:
Ambiguity in Emily Brontes 'Wuthering Heights' by ISBN: 3506704958Publication Date: 2020Since its publication, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has given rise to an unusual plurality of interpretations, leading to the impression that the novel somehow resists interpretation. The author offers a new reading of the novel that takes this effect into account by investigating its reason: ambiguity is a thematic focal point and structural key element of the novel. This study is concerned with the ambiguity of Wuthering Heights which arises through a complex interplay of distinct but interdependent ambiguities of perception, narration, and the narrated world. In particular, it shows how specific ambiguous utterances (e.g. a clash of implicatures and presuppositions) are linked with each other and contribute to the global ambiguity of the text. In this way, not only the function of ambiguity for understanding Wuthering Heights is explored but also the function of Wuthering Heights for understanding ambiguity.
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Wuthering Heights; a Collection of Critical Essays by Publication Date: 1968The structure of Wuthering Heights / Charles Percy Sanger - Emily Bronte : Wuthering Heights / Arnold Kettle - Fiction and the matrix of Analogy / Mark Schorer - The Bronte sisters and Wuthering Heights / Derek Traversi - Preface to Wuthering Heights / Albert J. Guerard - The circumambient universe / J. Frank Goodridge - Story and history in Wuthering Heights / Thomas A. Vogler - Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights / Virginia Wolf - Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights / David Cecil - On Wuthering Heights / Dorothy Van Ghent - Lockwood's dreams and the exegesis of Wuthering Heights / Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. - Implacable, belligerent people of Emily Bronte's novel, Wuthering Heights / V.S. Pritchett - Introduction to Wuthering Heights / David Daiches - The incest theme in Wuthering Heights / Eric Solomon - Emily Bronte and the metaphsyics of childhood love / Irving H. Buchen / Emily Bronte / J. Hillis Miller.
Wuthering Heights: Character Studies by ISBN: 1283122839Publication Date: 2008Readers and critics have been intrigued - and disturbed - by the characters of "Wuthering Heights" since its publication in 1847. Heathcliff and Catherine, the tormented and enigmatic lovers at the centre of the novel, have justifiably been the focus of critical attention. Yet the novel is peopled with a large cast of idiosyncratic characters, each of whom plays a significant role in the plot. This novel, with its references to physiognomy and monomania, its interest in dreams as revelations of the unconscious mind, and its recognition of the importance of origins in character-formation, reflects important developments in the conception of character and psychology in the nineteenth century.
Articles:
- "The Dead Are Not Annihilated": Mortal Regret in "Wuthering Heights"Author: Ingrid Geerken
Published: 2004
Regret is essentially generative of narrative. It is an emotion that engages the mind in a story-making process that seeks to correct a past experience. Regret can be formulated mentally and verbally through the conditional phrases "If only . . ."; "I wish I had . . .". In my larger work, I examine three types of regret: martial (regret over killing), marital (regret over marrying), and mortal (regret over the death of a loved one). Here, I will be looking at the psychological, structural and generic features of mortal regret. Although regret is an experience that crosses historical boundaries, my main focus is on the nineteenth century: I will be using Brontë's Wuthering Heights as an exemplary text of mortal regret. - “The loved shall meet on its hearth again”: Haunting as Promise of Connection in the Writing of Emily BrontëAuthor: James Quinnell
Published: 2020
This discussion argues, through a selection of Emily Brontë’s poetry, that her presentation of the ghostly stems from love rather than terror. Taking the famous ghost scene in Wuthering Heights as a starting point, the analysis explores how Brontë’s poetry illuminates differences between Lockwood’s clichéd response to Catherine’s ghost and Heathcliff ’s frantic desire for reunion with her. Brontë eschews the inclusion of the supernatural as sensationalized entertainment, instead viewing the ghost with pre-Reformation eyes—that is, as an expression of obligation and community. - The Lunatic and the Devil's Disciple: The 'Lovers' in Wuthering Heights hlen, MarianneThe romance between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights' cannot decidedly be called love, especially by adult readers. They are also reluctantly called lovers, since the nature of their passions do not fit the description of known concepts. Catherine's assertion that marriage to Heathcliff would degrade her even as she was claiming to be so in love with him and their repeated unloverlike pronouncements affirm the strangeness about their supposedly passionate romance. This lack of tenderness or compassion is not exclusive to the pair, however, for it includes everybody.
Books and Book Chapters:
Frankenstein by ISBN: 9780393927931Publication Date: 2011The text is that of the 1818 first edition, published in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. It is accompanied by an expansive new preface, explanatory annotations, a map of Geneva and its environs, and seven illustrations, five of them new to the Second Edition. Context is provided in three supporting sections: "Circumstance, Influence, Composition, Revision," "Reception, Impact, Adaptation," and "Sources, Influences, Analogues." Among the Second Edition's new inclusions are historical-cultural studies by Susan Tyler Hitchcock, William St. Clair, and Elizabeth Young; Chris Baldrick on the novel's reception; and David Pirie on the novel's many film adaptations.
Frankenstein by ISBN: 9780262533287Publication Date: 2017The original 1818 text of Mary Shelley's classic novel, with annotations and essays highlighting its scientific, ethical, and cautionary aspects. Victor, "the modern Prometheus," tried to do what he perhaps should have left to Nature: create life. Although the novel is most often discussed in literary-historical terms--as a seminal example of romanticism or as a groundbreaking early work of science fiction--Mary Shelley was keenly aware of contemporary scientific developments and incorporated them into her story. In our era of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and climate engineering, this edition of Frankenstein will resonate forcefully for readers with a background or interest in science and engineering, and anyone intrigued by the fundamental questions of creativity and responsibility. This edition of Frankenstein pairs the original 1818 version of the manuscript--meticulously line-edited and amended by Charles E. Robinson, one of the world's preeminent authorities on the text--with annotations and essays by leading scholars exploring the social and ethical aspects of scientific creativity raised by this remarkable story. The result is a unique and accessible edition of one of the most thought-provoking and influential novels ever written. Essays by Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow, Heather E. Douglas, Josephine Johnston, Kate MacCord, Jane Maienschein, Anne K. Mellor, Alfred Nordmann.
Articles:
- Filthy types: "Frankenstein", Figuration, FemininityRCL does not have access, but you can read this by getting a JSTOR account and using one of your 100 free articles per month.
Author: Steven Vine
Published: 1996
In scenes of polar extremity at the beginning of Frankenstein, Captain Walton and Victor Frankenstein philosophise about the value of friendship. A lone arctic adventurer, Walton tells Frankenstein about his wish to 'find [...] a friend', arguing that without 'intimate sympathy with a fellow mind' a man can 'boast of little happiness'. Frankenstein agrees, adding, 'we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves - such a friend ought to be - do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures'.1 For Frankenstein, human identity is not itself until it is 'made up' in a restorative relation to another self; without such supplementation, humanity is unfinished and 'unfashioned', 'weak and faulty'. Without the supplement of the other, humanity lacks the figure of humanity itself: botched and bungled, it is unrecognisable as human until it is restored by the other's recognition, until the other 'lend[s] his aid' to complete the self's confection. Till 'perfectionated', humanity is disfigured; or, in Frankenstein's terms, monstrous. In the same way that the monster laments the 'deformity of [his] figure' (p. 101) later in the text, Frankenstein represents humanity as a form of monstrosity, a mode of the unmade, a form of the unfashioned. Echoing the monster's own impassioned arguments for sympathetic relationship later in the novel, Frankenstein hints that sympathy is necessary in order to un-monster the monstrosity. - My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender RageAuthor: Susan Stryker
Published: 1994
Susan Stryker’s evocative retelling of the story of Frankenstein’s monster specifically responded
to Sandy Stone’s call for “post-transsexual” theorizing rooted in the embodied experience of transgender people, and was the first published academic work to link this project explicitly to queer critical theory. Like other early voices in the field, Stryker helped situate transgender studies in larger intellectual currents. She draws—explicitly or implicitly—on Kristeva’s notion of the abject and Althusser’s notion of interpolation, as well as on Butler’s notion of gender performativity. - Politics and Monsters: The Unmediated Desire for Order and Meaning in Shelley's FrankensteinAuthor: Dionyssios S Agiomavritis
Published: 2014
When one surveys the community and can no longer identify that anchor of true order, that reference point of common sense, which the middle level of existence represents, one becomes seized by a disorienting sense of crisis. [...]having no sense of belonging to a state of affairs that increasingly grows in disrepute, one initially suffers the need to pull away in the hopes of salvaging an authentic experience of truth. [...]Walton avoids Victor's fate not because he realizes that his actions are excessive but because he inhabits a community of sailors who succeed in pulling him back, thereby restraining his deviant "love of the marvelous." [...]even when the obvious dangers of an undertaking are revealed in the most graphic manner, they are often rejected by the person who is blinded by a maddening love of truth and good in the abstract. Possessed by imaginary constructions of reality, Walton is unable to grasp the effects of his actions.
Books and Book Chapters:
Drawing the Line by ISBN: 9780813934006Publication Date: 2013In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers--William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison--to examine the father's function as a "border figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead support the construction of a social identity by mediating between cultural oppositions. Fowler counters the widely accepted notion that boundaries are solely sites of exclusion and offers a new theoretical model of boundary construction. She argues that boundaries are mysterious, dangerous, in-between places where a balance of sameness and difference makes differentiation possible. In the fiction of these southern writers, father figures introduce a separate cultural identity by modeling this mix of relatedness and difference. Fathers intervene in the mother-child relationship, but the father is also closely related to both mother and child. This model of boundary formation as a balance of exclusion and relatedness suggests a way to join with others in an inclusive, multicultural community and still retain ethnic, racial, and gender differences. Fowler's model for the father's mediating role in initiating gender, race, and other social differences shows not only how psychoanalytic theory can be used to interpret fiction and cultural history but also how literature and history can reshape theory.
Reading Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' by ISBN: 9781847603272Publication Date: 2013Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of the most successful novels of all time, selling millions of copies internationally and inspiring critical commentary from scholars of the highest distinction. Its influence is such that it is studied by students of literature around the world and is often cited as one of the most significant books of modern times. However, its popularity belies its difficulty: many find the novel hard to read, struggling with its structure and occasionally fragmented style. This guide is designed to help readers engage with this complex book and achieve a deeper understanding of its context, the literary strategies it employs, and the various ways in which it has been interpreted since its publication in 1987.
Articles:
- A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison’s BelovedAuthor: Emma Parker
Published: 2001
Parker argues that Toni Morrison's "Beloved" explores the means by which the disempowered and dispossessed express personal dissatisfaction and enact political dissent. By examining the relationship between the repression of pain and the repossession of the past, she proposes that, like hysteria, Morrison's novel highlights the importance of confronting, reclaiming, and transforming history, and that it points to the healing potential of memory. - Reviving Selfhood: The Gothic and Otherness in Toni Morrison's BelovedAuthor: I-Tseng Tu
Published: 2012
The core of this novel exposes a theme about the impossibility of articulation, which deforms and disfigures slaves, and the eventual transformation of the horrible with the representation of the gothic elements. If the Gothic is often associated and represented with monstrous otherness, past horror and social injustice, then this exploration of the gothic elements in Beloved scrutinizes the Gothic and further concludes by seeing it with a perceptive presentation as a “subject,” in which the selfhood seems to dwell. - Terror, hospitality, and the gift of death in Morrison's BelovedAuthor: Puspa Damai
Published: 2014
Damai reads Toni Morrison's novel Beloved in relation to the political straitjacketing of terrorism on ethnic and gendered lines in the West and mobilizes Derrida's thoughts on death, autoimmunity, hospitality and the impossible gift as critical resources to read the literary text. He critiques J. Hillis Miller's reading of Morrison's novel through Derrida and goes back to Derrida himself to offer a more nuanced view of autoimmunity in the text. He questions the geopolitical model of terror as a Third World phenomenon entering into the Western reality and counterbalances the standard reading of the novel through the present of the 9/11 attacks by reinforcing the American history of slavery. His reading operating through the spectral ethic of hospitality as a futuristic opening towards the Other allows people to see how the literary text can become an ethical apparatus to critique and nuance any majoritarian and hegemonic simplification of terrorism.
