The Devil in the Slum: American Urban Gothic

American Gothic Culture ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401616.003.0006 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Loman

Keyword(s):

Gothic Novel ◽

Art Forms ◽

City Mysteries ◽

The Devil

This chapter focuses on the emergence of American urban gothic in literature of the late Antebellum. From roughly 1840 to 1860 a community of writers organized an extant urban gothic vocabulary into a popular and influential subgenre, city-mysteries, which ostentatiously announced their link to the gothic novel. These mysteries were intimately intertwined with urban reportage of the so-called ‘flash press’ among other art forms, especially the stage.

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ADAM SMITH MEETS THE DEVIL: DEMONIC PACTS AND MORAL SENTIMENTS IN THE GOTHIC NOVEL

Narrative Ethics ◽

10.1163/9789401209823_014 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 181-196

Keyword(s):

Adam Smith ◽

Moral Sentiments ◽

Gothic Novel ◽

The Devil

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Melmoth the Wanderer

10.1093/owc/9780199540297.001.0001 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Charles Maturin ◽

Chris Baldick

Keyword(s):

Narrative Structure ◽

Gothic Novel ◽

Spanish Inquisition ◽

The Devil ◽

The Wanderer

abstract Written by an eccentric Anglican curate, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought the terrors of the Gothic novel to a new fever pitch of intensity. Its tormented villain seeks a victim to release from his fatal pact with the devil, and Maturin’s bizarre narrative structure whirls the reader from rural Ireland to an idyllic Indian island, from a London madhouse to the dungeons of the Spanish inquisition.

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Rethinking Love as Passion: Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate

Literature ◽

10.3390/literature1020007 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 44-57

Author(s):

Geoff M. Boucher

Keyword(s):

Romantic Love ◽

Social Structures ◽

The Political ◽

Love Stories ◽

Gothic Novel ◽

The Devil

Jeanette Winterson’s magical realist love stories, such as The Passion, have been read by some critics in terms of a tendency to idealise romance as a transformative passion that transcends social structures. In this article, I propose that Winterson’s recent gothic novel, The Daylight Gate, critically revises a set of Romantic themes first broached in The Passion, exposing and interrogating the fantasy scenario at the centre of romantic love. This narrative about magic and the devil explores the ambivalence of passion as possession—diabolical and contractual—before using this to critique the desire for transcendence implied by “undying love”. Metaphysics becomes a metaphor for metapsychology, where the Romantic motif of undying love as connected to fatal desire is complicated by a traversal of the fantasy of the union of two immortal souls. These revisions have the effect of reversing the implications of Winterson’s earlier treatment of romantic love, turning it back from the personal towards engagement with the political.

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