Disco Elysium as Gothic fiction

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.

Gothic Overtones: The Female Monster in Margaret Atwood’s “Lusus Naturae”

In “Lusus Naturae,” Margaret Atwood shows her predilection for the machinations of Gothic fiction. She resorts to gothic conventions to express female experience and explore the psychological but also the physical victimisation of the woman in a patriarchal system. Atwood employs the female monster metaphor to depict the passage from adolescence to womanhood through a girl who undergoes a metamorphosis into a “vampire” as a result of a disease, porphyria. The vampire as a liminal gothic figure, disrupts the boundaries between reality and fantasy/supernatural, human and inhuman/animal, life and death, good and evil, femme fatale and virgin maiden. By means of the metaphor of the vampire woman, Atwood unveils and contests the construction of a patriarchal gender ideology, which has appalling familial and social implications.

The Supernatural Media Virus

Since the 1990s, the virus and the network metaphors have become increasingly popular, finding application in a broad range of everyday discourses, academic disciplines, and fiction genres. In this book, Rahel Sixta Schmitz defines and discusses a trope recurring in Gothic fiction: the supernatural media virus. This trope comprises the confluence of the virus, the network, and a deep, underlying media anxiety. This study shows how Gothic narratives such as House of Leaves or The Ring feature the supernatural media virus to negotiate as well as actively shape imaginations of the network society and the dangers of a globalized, technologized world.

Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

"Reading Habits in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. This article focuses on the way Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey’s heroine, is influenced and even guided by the literature she either chooses or is given to read. Her reading habits, as well as her changing typologies as a reader, influence both the development of her character and the narrative. This study also debunks the idea that Northanger Abbey is a parody of Gothic fiction, contextualizing book reading in an age when the novel was yet to be considered a respectable literary genre. Keywords: wise reader, the avid reader, the hypocritical reader, character development, narrative development, Gothic fiction, novel theory"

‘Powers of Their Own Which Mere “Modernity” Cannot Kill’: The Doppelgänger and Temporal Modernist Terror in Dracula

Of the many haunting figures that Gothic fiction invokes, none so perfectly encapsulates the mode itself, in all its fantastic incursions of opposing forces and clashing sensibilities, as the doppelgänger. Indeed, this figure in Gothic literature helps to push the bounds of subjective tension so central to the genre. This article examines Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as an entry into the canon of doppelgänger fiction by complicating traditional readings of the central relationship between Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker. By revisiting the novel within the framework of a doppelgänger narrative, this article suggests that part of the real terror for Stoker's fin-de-siècle audience lies in the novel's timing. Located in the gap between the retreating Romantic and advancing high modern epochs, the novel dramatizes the apprehensions of a culture experiencing enormous technological and social upheaval. Specifically, it offers in its doubled pair a means to navigate those anxieties.

Nature and the Sublime

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.