“More and More Fond of Reading”: Everything You Wanted to Know about Transgender Studies but Were Afraid to Ask Clara Reeve

Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Gothic novel The Old English Baron is a node for contemplating two discursive exclusions. The novel, due to its own ambiguous status as a gendered “body”, has proven a difficult text for discourse on the Female Gothic to recognise. Subjected to a temperamental dialectic of reclamation and disavowal, The Old English Baron can be made to speak to the (often) subordinate position of Transgender Studies within the field of Queer Studies, another relationship predicated on the partial exclusion of undesirable elements. I treat the unlikely transness of Reeve’s body of text as an invitation to attempt a trans reading of the bodies within the text. Parallel to this, I develop an attachment genealogy of Queer and Transgender Studies that reconsiders essentialism―the kind both practiced by Female Gothic studies and also central to the logic of Reeve’s plot―as a fantasy that helps us distinguish where a trans reading can depart from a queer one, suggesting that the latter is methodologically limited by its own bad feelings towards the former.

‘little gothics’: Misty and the ‘Strange Stories’ of British Girls’ Comics

This article uses a critical framework that draws on the Gothic carnival, children’s Gothic, and Female Gothic to analyse the understudied spooky stories of British comics. It begins by surveying the emergence of short-form horror in American and British comics from the 1950s onwards, which evolved into a particular type of girls’ weekly tale: the ‘Strange Story.’ It then examines the way that the British mystery title Misty (IPC, 1978–80) developed this template in its single stories. This focuses on four key attributes: the directive role of a host character, an oral tone, content that includes two-dimensional characters and an ironic or unexpected plot reversal, and a narrative structure that drives exclusively towards this final point. The article argues that the repetition of this formula and the tales’ short format draw attention to their combination of subversion/conservatism and horror/humour: foregrounding a central paradox of Gothic.

Barbara Comyns and New Directions in Women’s Writing

Focussing on Barbara Comyns’ first three novels, published between 1947 and 1956, Nick Turner asserts the originality of an undeservedly neglected writer. Comyns anticipates the female gothic and the Second Wave feminist impulse through her oppressed and vulnerable female characters. The essay suggests Comyns’ writing is innovative and challenging in three ways: firstly, for the way her depiction of domestic space, settings and movement, coupled with the notions of marriage, motherhood and family life, contests the status quo; secondly, for the manner in which the novels place the animal world in close proximity to the human world; and thirdly, for the nature of her comedy - black, surreal, anarchic. Demonstrating how Comyns at times engages with impressionist and surrealist art permits a consideration of her writing in the context of a so far minor tradition in British women’s literature and art, exemplified by Leonora Carrington.

‘On the Moon at Last’: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Female Gothic, and the Lacanian Imaginary

Recent work on Shirley Jackson has emphasized how Jackson masks the horror in her work to show violence and trauma embedded in ordinary domestic life. We Have Always Lived in the Castle seemingly departs from this pattern with a first-person narrator who is a murderer prone to delusive magical thinking. In this paper, I show that we can understand Castle's first-person narrative as a mask of a different kind by applying the Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real. Through the diegetic narrative, we see Merricat use the Imaginary to escape both the patriarchal Symbolic and traumatic Real. When we look at Castle in this light, we see how it develops and complicates the Gothic pattern of the missing mother and confined daughter, a pattern observable in Jackson's earlier fiction. By enclosing herself and her mother-figure in the Imaginary, Merricat victimizes Castle's real Gothic heroine: her sister Constance.