The Gothic Representations of the City through the Fl?neur in Victorian Literature

The Victorian Gothic moved away from old and conventional themes and spaces of early Gothic novels such as ruined castles and evil villains into more realistic spaces and characters that went hand in hand with the issues of the era. While the conventional Gothic space centered on the castle or other forms of old buildings, the city was an important component in Victorian Gothic imagery. In an era of growing mediation between the city and the urban dwellers, the gothic representations of the urban space in Victorian literature highly depended on the 'eye' of the its fl?neurs, or walkers who see, interpret, and produce the city. The fascination with modes of perceiving and seeing the mystery of the puzzling visual experience are evident in a wide variety of the nineteenth and twentieth-century theories and researches on the urban space. The focus of this paper is to graft some insights into debate on urban visuality and other related tropes that provide a range of perspectives on the field of the visual and perception of the city. Then, drawing from Victorian novels, this paper examines Dickens’s portrayals of urban subjects such as Gothic fl?neurs who produce the city as a Gothic place.

“Georeferencing” and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s narrative strategy (on the material of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)

The article approaches the narrative strategy employed by a famous American horror-writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft in his only novel “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” (1927) and introduces new terms – “georeferencing” and “georeference.” By the latter we mean a toponymical allusion, i. e. an implicit reference to the precedential text incorporated in a toponym (e. g. the author mentions Transylvania to make a georeference to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”). Lovecraft employs georeferencing and other forms of literary allusions to medieval legends, as well as to famous gothic novels written by his predecessors Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gustav Meyrink, Bram Stoker, etc. to create a meaningful context for his own novel. His goal is to create a common hypertextual universe, which can and will be productively navigated by a prepared reader. This strategy makes it possible for the reader to uncover hidden logics behind the fragmentary discourse and even foresee the outcome of the central battle between the principal characters. Lovecraft’s sophisticated intention and expert plot-structuring allows us to view “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” as a daring Modernist writing of the period, as well as to reassess Lovecraft’s reputation and cultural impact on the US literature of his time.

A Bakhtinian Approach to the Study of Eighteenth-Century English Gothic Novels

M. M. Bakhtin in the third essay of The Dialogic Imagination coined the term “chronotope” to denote the interaction and integration of time and space in novelistic narratives. Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope emphasizes that time and space coordinate with each other rather than insist on their individualities in narratives. The major chronotope of the novel usually determines its generic characteristics. The current study attempts to utilize Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope to anatomize the time-space structure of major Gothic novels in the eighteenth century, namely, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for the purpose of detecting and summarizing the common features of the Gothic genre. Manifold approaches and theories had been applied in this area, but it is the first time that Bakhtin’s chronotope was employed in the stylistic study of eighteenth-century Gothic novels written by Walpole and Radcliffe.

Emotions of Mystery in Gothic Novels and Thrillers

The article is dedicated to the study of the emotions of mystery in Gothic novels and thrillers. For many years, beginning with ancient times and up to modernity, mysteries and secrets were under thorough investigation by scientists. Mysteries, secrets and silence are associated with horror and happiness. That’s why they became the object of the proposed article. According to the linguacultural approach, the concepts were studied as complex phenomena, with composite meaning peculiar to the concepts under analysis. The concepts MYSTERY, SILENCE and SECRET, were considered as the typical situations, the structure of which consists of such spheres: actants, predicates, attributes, quantifiers, space and time. Each of these spheres represents part of the characteristics and makes it possible to create a general understanding of the concepts under analysis as of complex phenomena, which are most vividly revealed in Gothic novels and thrillers. These novels disclose the emotions of mystery as unknown, horrific and tense situations are the main feature of these genres. Mystery has the key role here and is the inseparable part of their understanding. It was demonstrated that the concepts under analysis represent positive and negative features which denote their ambiguous and binary character at the same time.

GOTHIC TRADITION IN LITERATURE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERMEDIAL ANALYSIS

The article is devoted to the insufficiently studied problem of using intermedial analysis for studying the Gothic tradition in the literature of Russian symbolism (on the example of V. Brusov’s and F. Sologub’s works). We focus our attention on transition a visual image or a medieval art motive from one sign system to another. We analyze how medieval cultural categories correspond to the chronotope and figurative system in the Gothic novels of the 18th - early 19th century. It is concluded that the Symbolists refer to the visual images of the Gothic novel not only as elements of tradition, but also as categories of the culture of the Middle Ages.

The Book as Fearful Thing

Some books seem to have the power to possess their readers. This chapter traces the figure of this fearfully empowered book in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, when such books challenged more familiar celebrations of literacy and of the press’s power to disseminate enlightenment. Using a concept of “magic materiality,” taking our cue from legends conflating the printer Johann Faust with the sorcerer Dr Faustus, we explore the association, in Scottish gothic novels especially, of printed books with fearsome potency and political danger. In Walter Scott’s The Monastery, we show, a “black book” with an eerie life of its own represents both a Protestant Bible and a book of spells. Finally, we consider a historical episode shaped by this literary phenomenon, demonstrating how over the course of the 1793 sedition trials in Edinburgh, copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man came to resemble the magic books of the era’s supernatural fiction.