The Gothic and Vampirism.pdf

Moderna Sprak , 2018

This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19 th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms, drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life, which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes, including nature and orientalism, all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven, Polidori's " vampire " is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures, and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.

Published in Fear Within Melting Boundaries, eds. Lee Baxter and Paula Braescu, 2011, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ebooks/fear-within-melting-boundaries/

H-Russia, H-Net Reviews, 2016

2002

Cambridge companion to gothic fiction / edited by Jerrold E. Hogle. p. cm.-(Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0 521 79124 3 (hardback)isbn 0 521 79466 8 (paperback) 1. Horror tales, English-History and criticism. 2. Horror tales, American-History and criticism. 3. Gothic revival (Literature)-United States. 4. Gothic revival (Literature)-Great Britain. i. Hogle, Jerrold E. ii. Series. pr830.T3 C36 2002 823 .0872909-dc21 2002020172 isbn 0 521 79124 3 hardback isbn 0 521 79466 8 paperback

2022

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault put forward the “repression hypothesis” concerning, in the modern age, sexuality. I postulate that Gothic fiction is a significant breakout of this hypothesis by highlighting (with reference to the vampire) its sexual transgressiveness. In Gothic literature, the vampire is an immortal creature who must prey on mortals to maintain their undeadness. Since early vampire stories, the vampire’s predatory behaviour has acquired a connotation of transgressive sexuality. This creative practice aims to explore vampiric desire and its connection to the emotions of love and loss as well with a focus on the same-sex desire of which there are relatively few examples in Gothic vampire fiction. This literature review, therefore, gives more account of Foucault’s “repression hypothesis” and then surveys vampire fiction as a subgenre of the Gothic, touching upon its origins and vampiric folklore and how these fictional creatures stand for Otherness and symbolise sexual transgression. Then I examine a selection of Queer realist fiction from the 20th and 21st centuries that offer insight into the themes of love, loss, and desire. Foucault’s use of Plato’s treatise, Phaedrus, aids in looking at queer realist fiction as models for gay desire, love, and loss. The insights gained by investigating these themes will be applied creatively to write a Queer vampire novella, entitled Lautréamont that challenges the conventions of desire in the genre, and which will ‘remix’ historical vampire fiction with contemporary queer literature on love, loss, and longing.

2017

Note: this is creative fiction. A fictional discovery of a previously undocumented encounter between John Polidori, friend of Byron, and a teenage Harriet Martineau. Shortlisted finalist in the (fiction) writing competition Dead Romantic Interviews, part of Writing Romantic Lives Conference, Edge Hill University, UK, November 2017.

H-Russia, H-Net Reviews, 2017

This article aims to address the genre of Gothic literature, its evolution and place in modern culture. Gothic fiction is a controversial genre, and while for certain critics, Gothic genre ended in the nineteenth century, for others the eighteenth-nineteenth century period represents only the first wave of Gothic fiction. In their opinion, Gothic genre actually never ended per se, but evolved, changing to reflect different realities. Today Gothic has morphed into multiple genres and has contaminated others. This article attempts to overview the development of Gothic fiction until present day, and to identify Gothic fiction tropes, while considering their evolution.