The Experimental Gothic

This essay proposes that the crucial movements of the historical avant-garde looked to the first wave of Gothic literature (1760s–1820s) in developing their respective variants of experimental prose. To date, the linguistic and textual characteristics (non-mimesis, ineffability) of the literary mode here called Experimental Gothic have not been comprehensively investigated, neither in Avant-Garde nor Gothic Studies. The proposed poetics of the Experimental Gothic indicates that the early avant-gardes did not straightforwardly recycle Gothic material but rather wove the praxis of contemporary theories of representation into their prosaic exploits, which were immersed in the imaginary, supernatural and irrational. The linguistic features of recognised works of avant-garde prose by luminaries such as Carl Einstein, Hugo Ball and Julien Gracq reveal the Experimental Gothic to be a language project spawned from anarchist backgrounds, which leads readers to reject their naïve belief in conventional representation in order to gain a renewed sense of reality.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley conceived of the central idea for Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus—most often referred to simply as Frankenstein—during the summer of 1816 while vacationing on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is her first and most famous novel. Although the assertion is debatable, some scholars have argued that Frankenstein is the first work of modern science fiction. Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein in response to a “ghost story” writing contest between herself, Percy Shelley, Percy Shelley’s physician and friend John Polidori, and Lord Byron, who were trapped indoors reading German ghost stories as the result of inclement weather. Polidori’s contribution to this contest, “The Vampyre: A Tale” (1819), influenced the development of Gothic literature. According to Shelley, she drew inspiration from a nightmare she had, which she attributed to discussions she overheard between Percy and Byron regarding experiments with electricity and animation. Shelley began working on the novel when she returned home to England in September, and the book’s first edition was published anonymously in 1818. Shelley’s father William Godwin made minor revisions for a second edition in 1821; and Shelley herself made more substantial changes for the third edition in 1831. The story is told through an epistolary frame, and follows Victor Frankenstein, a university student of the “unhallowed arts” who assembles, animates, and abandons an unnamed human-like creature. The creature goes on to haunt his creator both literally and metaphorically. Over the past two hundred years, the story has been widely influential, and re-interpreted in various forms of culture and media. In literary studies, scholars have discussed which edition of the text is the “truest” to Mary Shelley’s intended vision. The novel has been analyzed for its messages about human pride and hubris, the pursuit of knowledge, the nature/nurture question, as put forth by Rousseau, ethical questions in medicine and science, and family, gender, and reproduction, among other topics.

Style and Sense in William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily

<p>A Rose for Emily is a typical Gothic-style novel, intimately associated with the characteristics of Gothic literature: 1. Ghostly and horrible environment; 2. The tone of death; 3. Uncanny character images. Generally speaking, Gothic literature reveals the gloomy, dark, sad and mysterious literary styles, but what fascinates us most is the creation of atmosphere—being horrific, thrilling and intensive, which give people different kinds of sensory touches—Visually, physically and even spiritually. This Gothic style places emphasis on both emotion and a pleasurable kind of terror, thus embodying the senses of a quest for a horrible atmosphere, and an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion as well as the thrills of fearfulness to readers.</p>

The Nomadic Mood of Loneliness Embodied in The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

The article investigates the poem The Raven by American dark genius Edgar Allen Poe. The research was done basing on historical, biographical and psychological literary schools, and is aimed to disclose hidden link of the poem to the life of the author. Moreover, the research includes the study of elements of gothic literature depicted in the poem.

Puritan Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter" And Stephen King’s "Carrie"

It is considered that the Puritans that populated New England in the 17th century left a distinctive mark on the American culture. The article explores some projections of Puritan legacy in two American novels of different periods – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). After establishing a connection between the Puritan writings and gothic literature, the two novels are analyzed in terms of some Puritan projections, among which are the problem of guilt and the acceptance of an individual in the society. Some references regarding the idea of the witch and the interpretations it bears, especially in terms of the female identity, are also identified. Despite the different approach of the authors in terms of building their characters, those references are mostly used in a negative way, as an instrument of criticism and exposing inconvenient truths.

Can I Be Frank with You?

When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.

Jekyll, Hyde and the Victorian Construction of Criminal Working-Class Masculinities

Violent crime has long been associated with ideas of insane and/or intrinsically dangerous masculinities in the global north. Victorian Gothic literature, generated during a period when positivist discourse around dangerousness, madness and crime was gaining in authority and coherence, provides particularly useful insights into the narratives underpinning these associations. This paper focuses on the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which, being a work of cautionary horror written during an era of powerful cultural fascination with violent urban crime is particularly rich in such discourse. A range of methodological tools borrowed from literary criticism, legal studies and discourse analysis turn Stevenson's novella into a penetrative lens to examine the anxieties of 19th century medico-legal thinking. The many layers of the Jekyll-Hyde binary are analysed along a series of other relevant binaries that characterise many Victorian narratives around crime: reason against insanity, normativity against deviance, and respectable bourgeois masculinities against uncontrollable working-class masculinities, whose savage sexuality poses a threat to social order. Contextualised historically as part of the wider fin de siècle preoccupation with degeneration theory, as well as legally, having followed a long series of legislative and policing moves to control the disconcerting underclasses amassing in urban spaces, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde arises as a uniquely informative testament of the profound contradictions of a terrified post-Industrial Revolution Europe – what Moretti (1982) would call a dialectic of fear. Narratives such as the ones unfurling in the Strange Case are not, however, taken as mere reflections of the activities and anxieties of the Victorian medico-legal apparatus. Rather, this paper finds that the tensions permeating the novella constitute elements of a wider narrative construct whose main achievement was the validation and naturalisation of a deeply rigid social taxonomy, justifying the exertion of social and legal control upon populations inscribed as monstrous and Other. Keywords: Law and Literature, Criminology, Victorian Studies, Masculinities, Legal Psychiatry

‘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.

Семантический аспект понятия дом в готической литературе и его трансформация в прозе Говарда Филлипса Лавкрафта

The article examines semantic aspects of the concept of a house in Gothic literature and its transformation and comprehension by the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. A house in literature is not just an architectural element, an entourage; it is a living space that determines the emotional state of characters, their spiritual and mental quest. The semantics of the word “house” is very extensive, therefore different writers (H.P. Lovecaft in particular) artfully play with meanings, offering their own original interpretations of a house.