Gothic Studies

An overview of the Gothic Revival that began England in the mid-eighteenth century and which sought to revive medieval Gothic architecture in contrast to the neoclassical styles prevalent during the Augustan period. This article covers the movement in Europe and American, and was first published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, edited by Chris Murray (2003):

During the Renaissance, ‘Gothic’ became a pejorative label for all things barbarous. In a model of history probably first posited by Petrach and developed and disseminated by Italian Renaissance Humanists, it was believed that there were two epochs of cultural excellence, the Classical and their own. These were separated by a terrible period of ignorance and barbarism, the Dark and Middle Ages. The Germanic invaders, the Goths, were held to be largely responsible for this culturally catastrophic interregnum. François Rabelais employed the term ‘Gothic’ to describe a vulgar literary style, not reflecting Greek and Latin scholarship, and the most influential condemnation of all things Gothic can be found in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Architects, Painters and Sculptures (1550), in which medieval architecture is simply designated ‘German’ and rejected as mean, disorderly, over-decorative and poorly constructed, the antithesis of the now universally accepted Classical style. By the early-seventeenth century, the use of the term ‘German’ was discarded in this context (Germany having long since embraced the Classical ideal), scholars instead employing the adjective ‘Gothic’ in their polemics.

It was the British, always out of step with their European neighbours, that laid the foundations of a cultural re-evaluation which would later spread to the continent. Parliamentarians, quoting Tacitus, argued that representative government was in fact not a product of Classical antiquity, but of the German tribes; the ‘Gothic polity’ therefore represented free institutions and was opposed to tyranny and privilege. In art, the true Gothic revival began in England with a gradual shift in the crucial, Classicist-dominated, concept of Nature, as writers (influenced by the new vogue for landscape gardening), began to champion irregularity and variety as ‘natural,’ an idea eventually coming under the banner of the ‘picturesque.’ The related aesthetic concept of the (non-Classical) Sublime in opposition to the (Classically) Beautiful suggested that Nature in its highest (Sublime) form was free of the constraints of the Classical. This trend towards aesthetic relativism in England resulted in the pre-Romantic ‘Gothic mood’ which is most famously characterized by the fiction of Horace Walpole, most notable The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the ornamental papier-mâché decoration of Strawberry Hill, his country seat in Twickenham. This style went on to dominate nineteenth century Victorian architecture through the work of such influential figures as the prolific Sir George Gilbert Scott, his pupil George Edmund Street, the High-Churchman William Butterfield, Charles Barry, and the obsessive genius Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Among many fine examples, the most familiar is probably Barry’s re-designed Palace of Westminster (which had been destroyed by fire in 1834), which was specifically inspired by the Perpendicular Gothic style, Pugin assisting...

This article examines recent TV (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries) and cinematic stories (Twilight saga) from a feminist perspective. It focuses on the the gender relations and female agency embedded in these stories in order to determine if they conjure up any liberating potential for their audience.

According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualised as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests.

This study delineates how such Satanic feminism is expressed in a number of nineteenth-century esoteric works, literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets and journals, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures and even artefacts of consumer culture such as jewellery.

In the material, four motifs in particular are prominent: 1) interpretations of Eve’s role in the fall of man as something positive, 2) the witch as a proto-feminist figure, 3) the demon lover as an emancipator, 4) a feminised Satan contrasted with an oppressive male God. A fifth and less central motif is conceptions of Lilith, according to Jewish lore the unruly first wife of Adam, as the first feminist.

The analysis focuses on interfaces between esotericism and the political realm, as well as the interdependence of literature and the occult. New light is thus shed on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism and revisionary mythmaking. The study is informed by theories concerning counter-readings, counter-discourses and counter-myths, and in particular highlights the complex interplay of such phenomena and the hegemonic discourses that demonised feminism. A key theme in this context is the limits and paradoxes of inversion as a subversive strategy.

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Purple Hibiscus is an African postcolonial Gothic tale cautioning and warning against the falsely assumed sense of absolutism of the Roman Catholic Church and its definitive contestation with the concept of tradition. Adichie’s auto-fiction tells a tale of a child transgressing beyond a complicated set of interwoven boundaries in order to find herself and establish herself in the realms of religion and tradition – embodying two assumed contesting concepts. It is only through an extreme disassociation with herself that Kambili finds a sense of physical and emotional piece and forgiveness – she assumes the role of Kambili that was previously denied by her tyrannical father. Kambili’s shared, yet emotionally exclusive experiences with her mother and brother Jaja, provided the opportunity for these characters to emancipate themselves from the absolutist dystopian reality they were led to believe was the only reality.

Chartres Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres (French: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres), is a Roman Catholic church in Chartres, France, about 80 km (50 miles) southwest of Paris and is the seat of the Bishop of Chartres. Mostly constructed between 1194 and 1220, it stands at the site of at least five cathedrals that have occupied the site since the Diocese of Chartres was formed as an episcopal see in the 4th century. It is in the High Gothic and Romanesque styles.

800 years later in 2020 we have Schumann Resonators which are little boxes you plug into the wall that produce electromagnetic radiation tuned to 7.83 Hz.
This is the frequency that the earth/atmosphere system “rings” at when the Earth is struck by lightning. It is also a common frequency your brain “ticks” at.
If we are out of sync with Earth's Frequency (Schumann Resonance) we begin to exhibit signs of discomfort that can range from anxiety, insomnia, illness, suppressed immune etc… Conversely we have discovered that when we humans are in sync with 7.83hz the body is able to heal and increase its vitality. I use PEMF (pulsed electro magnetic field) therapy devices by Swiss Bionics with Schumann resonators. 

It seems the ancients knew about this too.

The cathedral is known as "the high point of French Gothic art" and a "masterpiece" and is well-preserved for its age: the majority of the original stained glass windows survive intact, while the architecture has seen only minor changes since the early 13th century.
The building's exterior is dominated by heavy flying buttresses which allowed the architects to increase the window size significantly, while the west end is dominated by two contrasting spires – a 105-metre (349 ft) plain pyramid completed around 1160 and a 113-metre (377 ft) early 16th-century Flamboyant spire on top of an older tower. Equally notable are the three great façades, each adorned with hundreds of sculpted figures illustrating key theological themes and narratives.


At least five cathedrals have stood on this site, each replacing an earlier building damaged by war or fire. The first church dated from no later than the 4th century and was located at the base of a Gallo-Roman wall; this was put to the torch in 743 on the orders of the Duke of Aquitaine. The second church on the site was set on fire by Danish pirates in 858. This was then reconstructed and enlarged by Bishop Gislebert, but was itself destroyed by fire in 1020. A vestige of this church, now known as Saint Lubin Chapel, remains, underneath the apse of the present cathedral.
It took its name from Lubinus, the mid-6th-century Bishop of Chartres. It is lower than the rest of the crypt and may have been the shrine of a local saint, prior to the church's rededication to the Virgin Mary.

In 962 the church was damaged by another fire and was reconstructed yet again. A more serious fire broke out on 7 September 1020, after which Bishop Fulbert (bishop from 1006 to 1028) decided to build a new cathedral. He appealed to the royal houses of Europe, and received generous donations for the rebuilding, including a gift from Cnut the Great, King of Norway, Denmark and much of England. The new cathedral was constructed atop and around the remains of the 9th-century church. It consisted of an ambulatory around the earlier chapel, surrounded by three large chapels with Romanesque barrel vault and groin vault ceilings, which still exist. On top of this structure he built the upper church, 108 meters long and 34 meters wide.
The rebuilding proceeded in phases over the next century, culminating in 1145 in a display of public enthusiasm dubbed the "Cult of the Carts" – one of several such incidents recorded during the period. It was claimed that during this religious outburst, a crowd of more than a thousand penitents dragged carts filled with building supplies and provisions including stones, wood, grain, etc. to the site.

In 1134, another fire in the town damaged the facade and the bell tower of the cathedral.
Construction was begun immediately on a new tower, the north tower, which was finished in about 1150. It was just two stories high and had a lead roof. The south tower, begun in 1144, was much more ambitious; it had a spire atop the tower, and, when finished in about 1160, it reached a height of 105 metres or 345 feet, one of the highest in Europe. The two towers were joined on the first level by a chapel devoted to Saint Michael. Traces of the vaults and the shafts which supported them are still visible in the western two bays.
The stained glass in the three lancet windows over the portals dates from some time between 1145 and 1155, while the south spire, some 103 metres high, was also completed by 1155 or later. The Royal Portal on the west facade, between the towers, the primary entrance to the cathedral, was probably finished between 1145 and 1245.

In Female Gothic and the Institutionalization of Gothic Studies, Lauren Fitzgerald considers that feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s is marked by a series of proprietary metaphors including ‘maps’, ‘territories’, ‘breaking ground’, ‘space’ and ‘landmarks’. In her view, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own. British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing and The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory and Sara M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination are what Showalter describe, in proprietary terms, moments of feminine criticism set out to map the ‘territory of the female imagination’.

The article explores the metamorphosis of a vampire figure in the beginning of the 19th century, when it evolved from a mindless walking corpse, well-known from Slavic folklore, into a deadly dangerous seducer of aristocratic backgrounds. The thorough interpretation of "Le Vampire" by Charles Nodier, staged for the first time in Paris in 1820, uncovers a strong relation between the hegemony of melodrama in the 19th-century theatre and the vampire fever, which expanded from France to other European countries.

<p>This article develops new models for the study of Italian Gothic prose in an international context. Poststructuralist paradigms that consider the intersections of subjectivity, identifications, and power structures (knowledge practices and spatial dispositions pertinent to the Gothic castle in particular) are applied for the purpose of explaining how Tommaso Landolfi generates two conflicting narrations in his 1947 novel <em>Racconto d'autunno</em> and puts one of them on top.</p>

Over the past twenty years, scholars have increasingly acknowledged the permeable nature of crime fiction, mapping those hybrid zones where its conventions mingle with those of other literary forms such as the Gothic novel and the ghost story. Nonetheless, Golden Age detective fiction – identified between the 1920s and the early 1950s  – continues to be seen as a purely cerebral sub-genre, in which the power of the Gothic was profoundly overshadowed by the rationalist act of detection. This essay aims to reassess this deep-rooted critical prejudice, showing that, despite increasing codification, supernatural and Gothic imagery, themes, and atmospheres played a surprisingly pervasive role in the evolution of detective fiction between and shortly after the two world wars.

A splash of something huge resounds through the sea-fog. In the stillness of a dark room, some unspeakable evil is making its approach.

This new selection offers the most chilling and unsettling of Hodgson's short fiction, from encounters with abominations at sea to fireside tales of otherworldly forces from his inventive `occult detective' character Carnacki, the ghost finder.

A master of conjuring atmosphere, when the horror inevitably arrives it is delivered with breathtaking pace and the author's unique evocation of overwhelming panic.

Known also as the age of revolutions, 18th century witnesses the rise of bourgeoisie, and
the fall of aristocracy. The new classes, rising up on the social ladder, were too greedy and violent,
and the emerging paradigm with its new individuals became the subject matter of the founder of
the gothic tradition in literature. Having come to power with no background, the new ruling classes
discarded the past, and ignored everything related to the previous paradigms. Having seen
the great schism, the new greedy individual, and the spiritual lacuna in his age, Walpole tries to
find a solution to the problem: he tries to combine man’s present with his past, his subconscious
with his conscious, and he also sees that restoration of aristocracy is much better than the chaos
and disorder of the new capitalist paradigm.
Key words: gothic, 18th century, Walpole, aristocracy

Critics have long believed that the Usher twins in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" have engaged in an incestuous relationship,  but these critics have stopped short of suggesting a reason for such any relationship.  This paper argues that Madeline Usher, the silent character in Poe's story, is pregnant by her brother Roderick, who seeks an heir for this family, a family that has always lain "in a direct line of descent."  The paper argues for a "legitimate" reading of Poe's story and examines character motivations--particularly those of Roderick and the "medical men"--plot, imagery and symbolism, the story within the story, vocabulary, and Poe's other uses of "monomania" and a "certain single effect" to argue for the pregnancy interpretation.

This paper analyses Eiko Ishioka’s Orientalisation of Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterwork. It questions, particularly, the position of Eiko as a Japanese fashion designer and contentions of Orientalism in regard to Dorinne Kondo’s (1997) statement that 'for Japanese designers… what counts as Japanese is always a problematic issue' (p. 56).

The framework for this investigation is Bram Stoker’s novel itself, and a comparative reading of Dracula’s character in connection with his 'Oriental' origins, in context with Victorian anxieties about colonisation and disease. In relation to Said’s theories on Orientalism, especially in terms of the 'coloniser' and the 'colonised', this study also explores the relationship between Orientalisation and feminisation and examines Dracula as the feminine 'Other'. A further extension is the position of women in fin-de-siècle society, the women’s rights movement, and how fears regarding Woman and the femme-fatale are intertextualised with these notions, reflected in both the novel and the film.

Reference

Kondo, D. (1997), About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, New York and London: Routledge.

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On the eve of the centenary of Stoker’s death, which occurred in April 1912, the University of Hull’s Department of English and School of Arts and New Media, in association with the Centre for Victorian Studies, hosted a three-day international conference, Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations.The conference was interested in the iconic significance of Stoker’s vampire novel and sought to reappraise Stoker’s work within its fin-de-siècle cultural climate. It was also interested in exploring the broader context of the changing nature of Gothic productions from the late-eighteenth century to the present. Using Dracula as a key point in the evolution of the genre, it sought to explore the novel’s Gothic predecessors and influences, and the manner in which Stoker’s work renewed the Gothic for future generations.

Seria "Perspektywy Ponowoczesności" (t. VII): "Groza i postgroza"

Świat stworzony przez Anne Rice jest jednym z najdokładniej opisanych i najbardziej interesujących  wampirzych uniwersów. Wykreowana przez autorkę przestrzeń nie emanuje grozą wprost, lecz w subtelny, nieraz zawoalowany sposób przedstawia imaginarium nowoorleańskiej pisarki, wzbudzając jednocześnie lęk i fascynację. Nagromadzenie elementów piękna spotyka się tutaj z opisami krwawych uczt wampirów, makabry ich dekapitacji, pełnego poczucia rozpaczy i samotności. Prezentacja trojga głównych bohaterów o skomplikowanej psychice wzbudza empatię – czytelnik zaczyna współczuć nieumarłym, rozumie ich, przenosi sympatię ze śmiertelników (po których stronie znajduje się zwykle odbiorca) na istoty, których powinien się obawiać.

A speculative examination of some manifestations of contemporary Horror through the lens of the Zombie; this article considers the relationship between Zombie Apocalypses, Zombies as agents (or not), and wider aspects of genre and theory including comic books and graphic novels, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.   

It surveys multimedia interest in zombies, mash-up novels, alternate universes, and the meetings of zombies with a range of other tropes in diverse narratives.

Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

H. P. Lovecraft is best known for his tales of cosmic horror, in which unnameable nightmares torment the limits of human consciousness. This mastery of weird and unspeakable terror is underpinned by the writers sizeable contribution to Gothic fiction. This new collection of Lovecrafts stories is the first to concentrate on his Gothic writing and includes tales from the beginning to the very end of the authors career. The writers weird vision mixes brilliantly with the trappings of earlier Gothic horror to form innovative mosaics of frightful fiction that will long haunt the readers subconscious.

Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighbourhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all.

Combining the accessibility of a popular history with original research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…

This book aims to analyze the genesis and evolution of late Gothic painting in the Crown of Aragon and the rest of the Hispanic kingdoms, examining this phenomenon in relation to the whole context of Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. The authors consider the influence of the Flemish primitive movement on the art produced by their Spanish colleagues, the artistic relations and interchanges with the Netherlands and other countries, and the introduction and development of the Flemish language in the Spanish lands. The book also examines altarpieces, considering topics such as changes in shape and structure and liturgical links, along with offering stylistic analyses supported by new technologies. Contributors are Joan Aliaga, Maria Antonia Argelich, Marc Ballesté, Judith Berg Sobré, Carme Berlabé, Eduardo Carrero, Ximo Company, Francesca Español, Francesc Fité, Montserrat Jardí, Nicola Jennings, Fernando Marías, Didier Martens, Isidre Puig, Nuria Ramón, Pedro José Respaldiza, Stefania Rusconi, Tina Sabater, Albert Sierra, Pilar Silva, Lluïsa Tolosa, Alberto Velasco, and Joaquín Yarza (†).

Women have been deemed mad for centuries. Such a diagnosis leads them to two paths: they either die within themselves, or, more advantageously, they ascend to a different level of freedom. In this paper, focusing on two texts produced in the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) and Kate Chopin’s The awakening (1899), we argue that, with a Gothic-like morbidity, their self-destructive protagonists, when facing restricting and limited lives, are aroused by a death instinct more satisfying than the unbearable reality they live in. Thus, it is through the annihilation of life, either via madness or death, that they reach liberation.

This essay seeks to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula through the lens of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theses to explore Stoker’s construction of the monstrous. I argue that the characters in Dracula are monstrous because they weaken boundaries and cross borders, especially blurring the distinction between human and animal, acting as beings to be both desired and feared.

This paper was awarded a Distinction.

Horror is unlike any other literary genre. It seeks to provoke uniquely strong reactions like fear, shock, dread or disgust, and yet, remains very popular. It also crosses media, manifesting in narrative forms such as graphic novels and video games. Its characters and trends routinely escape the confines of given texts and become part of the zeitgeist. Of course, horror is most readily associated with the film industry, but horrific short stories and novels have been wildly loved by readers for well over two centuries. Despite its persistent popularity, there is no up-to-date history of horror fiction for the general reader.
This ground-breaking new book is the first comprehensive history of horror fiction to take readers from the first Gothic novel in 1764 to the ‘new weird’, and beyond, in the early twenty-first century. It offers a chronological overview of the genre in fiction and explores its development and mutations over the past 250 years. It also challenges the common misjudgement that horror fiction is necessarily frivolous or dispensable. Leading experts on Gothic and horror literature introduce readers to classics of the genre as well as exciting texts they may not have encountered before.
The topics examined include: horror’s roots in the Gothic romance and antebellum American fiction; the penny dreadful and sensation novels of Victorian England; fin-de-siècle ghost stories; decadent fiction and the weird; the familial horrors of the Cold War era; the publishing boom of the 1980s; the establishment of contemporary horror auteurs; and the post-millennial zombie trend. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: What, Why and When Is Horror?
Xavier Aldana Reyes

Chapter 1. Gothic and the Cultural Sources of Horror, 1740–1820
Dale Townshend

Chapter 2. American Horror: Origins and Early Trends
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Chapter 3. Horror in the Nineteenth Century: Dreadful Sensations, 1820–1880
Royce Mahawatte

Chapter 4. Transitions: From Victorian Gothic to Modern Horror, 1880–1932
Roger Luckhurst

Chapter 5. Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer
Bernice M. Murphy

Chapter 6. The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971–2000
Steffen Hantke

Chapter 7. Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16
Xavier Aldana Reyes

Further Critical Reading

English translation of title: 'Revenant(s),borderliner(s), double(s): Rites de Passage in Bram Stoker's Dracula' by Michaela Schäuble.

German book title: 'Michaela Schäuble: Wiedergänger, Grenzgänger, Doppelgänger. Rites de Passage in Bram Stokers Dracula'. Münster: LIT Verlag 2006'.

Review published in: Anthropological Notebooks 15 (1). Ljubljana: Slovene Anthropological Society 2009, pp. 101-103.

This article discusses Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from the perspective of the notion and the activity of looking or being looked at. It is argued that the power of the gaze and the particular semiotics of " ocular economy " , while to some extent linked to biographical contexts, can also be noticed in Walpole's text itself. What is studied is not only the way in which images are used in the text, i.e. what function they perform, but also how they structure the importance of an appeal to vision and images within hauntological perspective and the Gothic genre of literature. R

The Call of Duty series is one of the most successful entertainment franchises of the twenty-first century. Among its many instalments is the trilogy Call of Duty: World at War (2008), Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2013). These three games combine intense action elements with specific political content that rehearses established orthodoxies on WWII but also comments on the Cold War and on the more recent War on Terror. Interestingly, all three games also come with a ‘zombie mode’ where the gamer uses the same military hardware to fight the undead on a series of different maps. The conflation of gothic and military content is not new to the First Person Shooter genre that Call of Duty belongs to. The amalgamation of war and gothic was at the heart of the foundation of the First Person Shooter with games such as ID Software’s Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993). Thus, the Zombie mode returns the First Person Shooter to its military/gothic origins, but it also modifies these origins.

This essay first briefly surveys the development and transformation of the military FPS game, to then discuss the revisionary WW2 narrative that emerges in the US at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Following this, the essay explores the rise of the zombie in American popular culture and the appearance of the Nazi Zombie in the late 1970s. The essay finally maps both the hyperreal geography of WW2 and the gothic territory that the game conflates. As the essay argues, the Zombie Mode testifies to a deeply rooted, post-millennium desire also exhibited by the War on Terror to enforce the borders that separate self from other, civilized from primitive, West from East. At the same time, the Zombie mode is informed by a very gothic tendency to understand such borders as porous or even as a source of terror.

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Each volume follows the means by which prohibitions and taboos were produced and circulated. The reader can therefore explore the processes that disciplined the representation of the body and the construction of sexual outcasts. This four-volume set presents a wide range of textual material: criminal reports; scientific and medical publications; newspaper items; sex manuals; guidebooks; speculative accounts, and case histories.

Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality - the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.

In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities - and terrors - with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood

The existing canon of scholarship on Dracula asserts that the sexually aggressive female vampires are representative of the New Woman, and thus are evidence of Stoker&#39;s conservative reaction to changing gender roles. In contrast, this article offers a reinterpretation Dracula in the light of key writings of the New Woman movement which sought to demonize the Victorian marriage market because of its creation of a class of female parasites: idle middle-class woman entirely dependent on fathers and husbands. A close reading of key sections of the novel demonstrates that the female vampires are characterized as traditionally subordinate Victorian housewives, in contrast to the positive presentation of Mina Harker as a New Woman. This reading reveals a text that argues that work for women is the only antidote to the degeneration inherent in traditional womanhood, through which women are reduced to nothing more than their biological functions.

This chapter examines the Mexican-American border as a gothic space created by a combination of postcolonial power relations and the new economic and political conditions produced by NAFTA.  The main focus of the chapter will be Gregory Nava’s gothic thriller, Bordertown, which tells of a young Indian maquiladora worker who is raped and left for dead, but who crawls out of her grave and tells her story to a journalist. The film draws heavily on gothic imagery and codes in order to suggest that border towns such as Cuidad Juarez are modern hells (in the tradition of Melville’s ‘Tartarus of Maids’) created by neoliberal practices that prey especially on young female workers, often from indigenous tribes.

The article is an attempt at comparing two short stories published fifty years apart: Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Visit to the Museum” (1939) and Steven Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” (1990). An atypical venture into gothicity to dramatize an imaginary return to Soviet Russia is juxtaposed with a more characteristic engagement with the fantastic in praise of the imagination and popular culture. Blurring the boundary between exhibition space and ‘the real world’ through the figure of an infinite museum, the two texts variously mobilize the gothic tradition, with its crucial tensions between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the illusory, the internal and the external, the past and the present, the dream and the nightmare. Entering into complex relationships with historicity, the two short stories position themselves very differently with regard to the notions of the individual and the communal.