Genealogies of Monstrosity: Darwin, the Biology of Crime and Nineteenth-Century British Gothic Literature

By the late 1840s, a new genre of literature revealed deep concerns with corruption in the growing urban centers. City mysteries exposed a dark underworld of the metropolis, leading readers through smoky saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. More than any other “sin of the city,” urban gothic literature focused on prostitution. The female prostitute embodied the greatest antithesis to the ideal or “true” woman. Anticonvent literature often compared nuns to prostitutes, convents to brothels, priests to seducers, and Mother Superiors to madams. City mysteries mirrored convent narratives in their description of women being seduced into lives of misery and sexual deviance. Both convent narratives and city mysteries promised to unveil a hidden world of sin and debauchery for an eager readership. This chapter compares convent tales and city mysteries, focusing on the nun-prostitute figure and the ways in which this female archetype threatened nineteenth-century female gender norms.

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Haunted Hemisphere: American Gothic Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

10.18130/v3r831 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Katie Bray

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Gothic Literature ◽

American Gothic

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‘A nightmare of horror’

Dead of Night ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9780993238437.003.0002 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 15-26

Author(s):

Jez Conolly ◽

David Owain Bates

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Gothic Literature ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Oral Storytelling ◽

Frame Narrative ◽

Horror Genre ◽

Frame Story ◽

British Cinema ◽

New Form ◽

Century Literature

This chapter illustrates the antecedents of Dead of Night and charts its line of influence. In many respects, Dead of Night was more a cinematic pinnacle of a storytelling tradition than a forebear of a new form. Fundamentally, the frame narrative is a device that dates back to some of the earliest known examples of recorded storytelling, which were frequently collections of even earlier tales originating in oral storytelling cultures. Beyond these early ancestral highpoints of the frame story form, there are more direct forerunners to Dead of Night to be found in nineteenth-century literature, particularly Victorian Gothic literature. The chapter then looks at the anthology format. During the decade after Dead of Night, British cinema may have been dark at times — there were numerous British noir films made in that period, several of which were produced by Ealing Studios — but it rarely delivered full-blown scares. It would take Hammer Films' move into the horror genre for this to recommence.

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Afterword

Spectres of Antiquity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190910273.003.0008 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 227-234

Author(s):

James Uden

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Ancient World ◽

Gothic Literature ◽

Contemporary Life ◽

Current Paradigm ◽

Better Than

The book ends with a brief “Afterword,” offering examples of nineteenth-century versions of the “Gothic classicism” traced in this book, and posing the question of how Gothic literature and criticism might help us to reconceive our examinations of the presence of antiquity in contemporary life. After brief accounts of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Coliseum” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, It argues that the notion of “haunting” captures the continuing presence of the classical past better than the current paradigm of “reception,” especially when we aim to analyze aspects of the ancient world with a pernicious legacy in the present.

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Gothicizing Victorian Folklore: Spring-heeled Jack and the Enacted Gothic

Gothic Studies ◽

10.3366/gothic.2020.0035 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 14-30

Author(s):

Karl Bell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Gothic Literature ◽

Everyday Lives ◽

Cultural Dialogue ◽

Cultural Functions ◽

Urban Legend

This article focuses on the Victorian bogeyman, Spring-heeled Jack, as a historicised example of Gothic and folklore's cultural dialogue and divergences in nineteenth-century Britain. Variously described as a ghost, beast, or devil when he first terrorised Londoners in 1837–38, Spring-heeled Jack evolved from local folklore to press sensation to penny dreadful serials. These texts reworked his folkloric accounts through stories that were heavily indebted to earlier Gothic literature for many of their narrative tropes. The article uses this urban legend to explore what it terms the enacted Gothic; the eruption of folkloric and gothic elements beyond the bounds of fiction and into Victorians’ everyday lives. While encouraging Gothic scholarship to engage with folkloric ‘texts’, it argues that we need to look beyond obvious similarities to appreciate important distinctions arising from their differing natures, cultural functions, and modes of storytelling.

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Conclusion: From the Gothic to the Medieval

Gothic Antiquity ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198845669.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 311-356

Author(s):

Dale Townshend

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Gothic Literature ◽

John Ruskin ◽

Horace Walpole ◽

Architectural Practice ◽

Dark Ages ◽

William Beckford ◽

The One ◽

First And Second Generation ◽

Architectural Imagination

The concluding chapter to the book seeks to account for the changes that the architectural imagination underwent in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Guided by the concept of ‘purification’, it shows how the construct of the Gothic ‘Dark Ages’ was revised in contemporary historiography and replaced with the less injurious notion of the ‘medieval’; how first- and second-generation romanticism curtailed the excesses of the Gothic architectural imagination; and how nineteenth-century Gothic Revivalists such as A. C. Pugin, A. W. N. Pugin, and John Ruskin reacted against the amateur Gothic experiments of Horace Walpole and William Beckford. What emerges in the discussion is an architectural imagination that is very different from the one of the previous century, that rich, associative aesthetic that drove the production of Gothic literature and revivalist architecture from the start. In a brief coda, the discussion briefly charts the professionalization of architectural practice that took effect from 1834 onwards.

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