Gothic Literature

This 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.

Authors: 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.

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.

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.

Author: 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 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.

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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.

Author: 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.

Author: 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.

Author: 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.

Author: 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.

Author: 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.