The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle.European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960. Edited by Avril Horner.Monk Leuns: A Critical Biography. D. L. Macdonald.Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Edited by Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank.British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824. Toni Wein.Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Julian Wolfreys.

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 179-182
Author(s):  
Diane Long Hoeveler
Keyword(s):  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Uncanny

scholarly journals The Strange Case of Teaching English Through the Gothic Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
Simona Maggi
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Huge Amount ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Reading Materials ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Intensive Reading

In this article I endeavour to encourage teachers of Secondary Education to use English literature in their English language lessons. Indeed, literature provides a huge amount of authentic reading materials, making the students practise extensive as well as intensive reading, which is crucial for the foreign language acquisition. Moreover, it is an enormous source of motivation, allowing students to give free rein to their imagination and enjoy their English lessons. The election of gothic fiction is linked to this latter purpose: the 19th gothic genre is generally well accepted by adolescents as it represents a way to reflect on themselves through a journey to “self-revelation”. The double personality/identity-theme of R. L. Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde fits well into their interests and their quest for self-knowledge. It offers them the chance to process what they are going through in this often unstable stage of their journey into adulthood by trying to figure out their place in the world.   Keywords: Reading skill, Literature in ELT, Gothic fiction, R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Double identity

scholarly journals Disco Elysium as Gothic fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
Julian Novitz
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Playing Game

Abstract Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representational elements, particularly its emphasis on the instability of its protagonist, the sense of decline and decay conveyed through its setting, and the interconnected secret histories that are revealed through exploration. Furthermore, many of the game’s stylistic and ludic features, such as its dense description and emotive language, and its overwhelming array of options, interactions, and responses, can be understood as engagements with the uncanny and disorienting excess of the Gothic tradition. These Gothic elements manifest most frequently through the game’s attempt to represent psychological complexity within its role playing system, its depictions of urban spaces, and its approach to questions of unresolved memory and history. The presence of these Gothic features in Disco Elysium work to contest the game’s categorisation as a ‘detective role playing game.’ While the genres are closely connected, detective fiction typically follows a trajectory in which the history of the central mystery becomes progressively clearer through the accumulation of information and detail, whereas the Gothic traditionally seeks to maintain and heighten a sense of disorientation. Exploring the tension between Disco Elysium’s Gothic elements and its status as a detective game allows for a richer appreciation of the political and social commentary that emerges from both its narrative and gameplay.

The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley: Piracy, Print Culture, and Irish Gothic Fiction

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-244
Author(s):  
Christina Morin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of

Published in Dublin by the prominent Catholic printing firm of James Hoey, The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760) has been identified in recent years as an earlier Irish gothic fiction than Horace Walpole's putatively pioneering gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). The discovery that Sophia Berkley is, in fact, a re-print of an earlier London publication, The History of Amanda (1758), casts significant doubt on the novel's contribution to the development of Irish gothic literature. This article argues that attention to the particulars of the novel's publication history as well as its later misidentification paints a revealing picture of popular publishing in Dublin in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It further contends that Sophia Berkley's identification as early Irish gothic – although mistaken – has proven instrumental in scholarly re-evaluations of late-eighteenth century Irish gothic literary production.

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. An English gothic novel in the context of moral philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 282-297
Author(s):  
I. O. Markova
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Strong Ties ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
James Hogg ◽  
Sense And Sensibility

The article is concerned with the unique ethical and aesthetic features of gothic fiction between the 18th and 19th centuries, and its representation in James Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Lofty ideals in the novels by A. Radcliff, M. G. Lewis, and C. Maturin often showed strong ties with moral philosophy (its concepts of benevolence, sin as the opposite of freedom, and sense and sensibility as the sources of virtue), permeating 18th-century discussions about morality along with reflections on the elevated and the picturesque. On the artistic plane of the gothic novel, these ideas create two principal oppositions, corresponding to ethical and aesthetic levels: ‘the natural and the unnatural’, and ‘freedom and non-freedom’. They are also present in Hogg’s novel, although represented in a different way. While the ‘natural/unnatural’ dichotomy is mostly a matter of changing the angle for the story’s perception (so that the reader might follow the events from the viewpoint of the pursuer rather than the pursued), though not without interesting aesthetic derivatives, the ‘freedom/non-freedom’ opposition marks a more modern aesthetical transition from the outside world to a fictional one.

scholarly journals The Significance Of Space In Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn As A Twentieth-Century Irish Gothic Novel

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Joanna Jarząb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Differentiation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Almost All

Abstract During the twentieth century almost all literary genres came back to prominence in different and alternative forms. The Gothic is no exception to this phenomenon as many a writer made an attempt at using this eighteenth-century genre once again, but adding to it some contemporary elements. Consequently, an abundance of new techniques have been introduced to Gothic fiction to evoke the feeling of horror and terror among the more and more demanding readers of modern times. Still, some writers prefer to return to the traditional concept of the Gothic – as does Iris Murdoch in her novel The Unicorn. The purpose of this article is to analyse the text from the perspective of the Irish Gothic. Those features of the genre which are traditional as well as local are going to be discussed in the context of space as the dominating aspect of the novel. The typical Irish landscape abounding in marshes, bogs and the sea will be contrasted with the inner space of the house, and its resemblance to the old Victorian mansions popular among the Anglo-Irish ascendancy of nineteenth-century Ireland. In what follows, the paper aims at showing how Murdoch’s skilful play with the spatial differentiation between the inside and the outside dislodges other more universal issues, such as the question of freedom, of social taboos and of the different anxieties still present in Irish society today.

scholarly journals Gothicizing Domesticity – The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allan Poe

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-16
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Băniceru
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Domestic Narratives

Abstract It is critical common knowledge that domestic narratives and the structure of traditional domesticity are subverted in Gothic fiction (Smith 2013). The household and its apparent security are threatened from within by unknown supernatural forces. What seems familiar becomes upsetting, strange and ‘unfamiliar’. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat” give comparable views on American domesticity, both questioning two important aspects of domestic life (family and a blissful household). The two writers create a mad discourse in which the inexplicable and the uncanny infiltrate into reality and the sentimental domestic narrative is undermined.

scholarly journals ALEXANDRE DUMAS AND A GOTHIC NOVEL (DEDICATED TO 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WRITER’S DEATH)

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-140
Author(s):  
Kirill A. Chekalov
Keyword(s):  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Alexandre Dumas ◽  
The Village

The article considers the characteristics of interpretation by Alexandre Dumas père of a genre of gothic fiction based on the writer’s less popular works: Le Château d’Eppstein, 1843 and Le Pasteur d’Ashbourn,1853. Alexandre Dumas père deviates from the genre’s traditional surrounding, i.e. the southern France, Italy, Spain. Le Château d’Eppstein is set in Germany; by connecting the legendary past with the historical time, Dumas enhances one of the genre’s inherent features, at the same time enriching the narrative with a dense intertextual component. The events of Le pasteur d’Ashbourn happen in England. The first part of the book is a rescript of a sentimental novel Leben Eines Armen Landpredigers by August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine (1801; translated in French by Isabelle de Montolieu as Nouveaux Tableaux De Famille Ou La Vie D’un Pauvre Ministre De Village Allemand Et De Ses Enfants – 1802; translated in English as The Village Pastor and His Children – 1803), which beautifully contrasts with a traditional gothic plot of the second part and an extensive ironic epilogue. Both novels demonstrate that Dumas did not intend to imitate the gothic fiction, but rather to transform it by means of witty genre and stylistic experiments.

CONSERVATION OF ENERGY, INDIVIDUAL AGENCY, AND GOTHIC TERROR IN RICHARD MARSH'STHE BEETLE, OR, WHAT'S SCARIER THAN AN ANCIENT, EVIL, SHAPE-SHIFTING BUG?

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Jones
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Conservation Of Energy ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Human Energy ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Gradual Decay

There is a familiar critical narrativeabout the fin de siècle, into which gothic fiction fits very neatly. It is the story of the gradual decay of Victorian values, especially their faith in progress and in the empire. The self-satisfied (middle-class) builders of empire were superseded by the doubters and decadents. As Patrick Brantlinger writes, “After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial ‘stock’” (230). And this late-Victorian anomie expressed itself in the move away from realism and toward romance, decadence, naturalism, and especially gothic horror. No wonder, then, that the 1880s and 1890s saw a surge of gothic fiction paranoiacally concerned with the disintegration of identity into bestiality (Stevenson'sThe Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), the loss of British identity through overpowering foreign influence (du Maurier'sTrilby, 1894), the vulnerability of the empire to monstrous and predatory sexualities (Stoker'sDracula, 1897), the death of humanity itself in the twilight of everything (Orwell'sThe Time Machine, 1895). The Victorian Gothic, thus, may be read as an index of its culture's anxieties, especially its repressed, displaced, disavowed fears and desires. But this narrative tends to overlook the Victorians’ concerns with the terrifying possibilities of progress, energy, and self-assertion. In this essay I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siècle Gothic – horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorians’ seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obscured that culture's persistent anxiety about the terrors of energy. I examine mid- to late-Victorian accounts of human energy in relation to the first law of thermodynamics – the conservation of energy – in both scientific and social discourses, and then I turn to Richard Marsh's 1897 gothic novelThe Beetleas an illustration of my point: the conservation of energy might have been at least as scary as entropy to the Victorians.

scholarly journals THE UNCANNY IN «CARMILLA» BY J. S. LE FANU IN THE CONTEXT OF NIETZSCHEAN AND PSYCHOANALYTIC PERCEPTION

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (17) ◽  
pp. 112-116
Author(s):  
Tamara Kyrpyta
Keyword(s):  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Horror Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Ideal

The article deals with the category of uncanny as an integral part of Gothic literature in the aspect of philosophical and aesthetic views. It traces the connection between the notions of «horrible», «ugly» and «sublime», as well as the artistic embodiment of this connection in the novella about the vampires «Carmilla» by J. S. Le Fanu. Sigmund Freud’s article «The Uncanny» gave literary critics one of the key concepts that are used in the analysis of Gothic literature and literature of horror. The Uncanny, according to Freud is something strange, which disguises itself as a familiar one, it is something that should be hidden, but suddenly showed itself. In Gothic, this is usually embodied in anthropomorphic objects that resemble humans (or other living creatures), but are not in truth: dolls, mechanical toys, art images, etc. That is, the things acquire properties unusual and uncharacteristic for them. At the heart of the horror literature as a successor to a Gothic novel lays the idea of the wrongness and disharmony. In this context, Freud’s «uncanny» echoes the Kantian notion of «sublime», as well as, to a certain extent, the paradox of the ugly put forward by N. Goodman. Kant’s «sublime» is aesthetically close to Freud’s «uncanny». This is something recognisable and at the same time immense, which gives a sense of grandeur and even holiness, and hence, causes surprise, connected with awe and fear. The ideal content of the sublime is far greater than its real embodiment. Following F. Nietzsche, who advocated aesthetic relativism and considered the irrationalDionysian impulse to be no less important than the rational Apollonian one, the postmodernists rejected the aesthetic distinction between Good and Evil and, consequently, the contrast between the Beautiful and the Ugly. Thus, N. Goodman, in his paradox of the ugly, says that under certain circumstances ugly objects can be perceived as attractive ones, and the beautiful arouses disgust. And J. Kristeva believes that it is through disgust caused by the ugly that catharsis occurs as purification from existential fear. We traced the features of the artistic embodiment of horror, disgust and uncanny in «Carmilla» by J. S. Le Fanu.

scholarly journals Gothic beetle: a comment on one of Pushkin’s allusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-79
Author(s):  
V. V. Maroshi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
Literary Allusion ◽  
Eugene Onegin ◽  
A Chain ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Minor Character

The paper deals with the beetle as a minor character of the seventh chapter of the novel “Eugene Onegin” and a literary allusion. It is syntactically and rhythmically highlighted in the text of the stanza. V. V. Nabokov was the first to try to set the origin of the character from English literature. The closest meaning of the allusion was a reference to V. A. Zhukovsky, with his surname associated with the beetle by its etymology and the appearance of a “buzzing beetle” in his translation of T. Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The landscape of the 15th stanza of the novel is represented within the genres of elegy, pastoral, and ballad. We expand the field of Pushkin’s allusion to the Gothic novels of A. Radcliffe and Gothic fiction in general. Mentioning the beetle launches a chain of reminiscences from Gothic novels during Tatiana’s walk and her visit to Onegin’s empty “castle.” The quotations from Shakespeare and Collins in Radcliffe’s novels are of great significance. Shakespeare’s beetle, a Hecate’s messenger, is involved in creating an atmosphere of night fears and mystery surrounding the scene in Onegin’s castle. A collection of Radcliffe’s novels in Pushkin’s library suggests the poet was somewhat familiar with the paratext of the novel “The Romance of the Forest”. Moreover, the beetle as a parody character for a ballad and a Gothic novel appeared in the unfinished poem “Vasily Khrabrov” by the poet’s uncle, V. L. Pushkin.

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