A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’

This chapter posits a psychoanalytic reading of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s short story ‘I fatali’ (‘The Fated Ones’) published posthumously in the collection Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) (1869). It focuses on the mortal rivalry between the father and son figures, Count Sagrezwitch and Baron Saternez, who become known in late nineteenth-century Milanese society of the short story as true embodiments of fatal beings belonging to popular superstition, known as jinxes – bringers of bad fortune, illness, harm, and even death to others. Drawing from Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of the Doppelgänger, it is argued that these protagonists emerge as complementary doubles for one another, as opposing incarnations of Death in the form of mysterious foreigners. This chapter also highlights the post-Unification, socio-cultural undertones of Tarchetti’s fantastic tale, affirms the existence of an Italian Gothic, and reveals the author’s portrayal of death’s spectacular nature.

Deadly interrogations: cycles of death and transcendence in Byron’s Gothic

A number of Byron’s works – in particular The Two Foscari but also ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, Manfred, and Sardanapalus – can be located firmly within the Gothic. The tyrannical burden exerted by ancestry, for example, is a Gothic theme seen in these works, while ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ and The Two Foscari also feature the Gothic scenarios of incarceration and torture: in both cases that which is loved and familial repeatedly becomes a source of pain and death. Yet Byron also moves beyond the Gothic view of death by presenting so many figures, from Manfred to Jacopo Foscari, who appear to actively exhibit a death drive, which is dramatised as a means of transcending different forms and conditions of imprisonment and torture. Death is a repeated event in these works where significant and extended claims are also made by Byron for the existence of variously imagined (mental, physical, and textual) afterlives.

Dead again: zombies and the spectre of cultural decline

This chapter investigates the Gothic as a mode of writing that escaped generic literary boundaries during the British debates over the French Revolution in order to express more widespread fears of cultural decline. Positing the current ubiquity of the zombie as a resurgence of this Gothic mode, the chapter explores zombie-apocalypse texts as expressing a return of Malthusian worries about population growth, climate change, financial instability, and energy insecurity. The zombie-apocalypse genre, popularized by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), released within a few years of U.S. peak oil production, has become a mainstay of global cinema, fiction, and television in the recent international scramble for alternative energy sources. These texts, like the Gothic in its first heyday, demonstrate a conflicted desire both to confront and dismiss problems that seem as inconceivable as they appear to be insoluble. Today’s zombie stands, then, much as the envisioned undead did for earlier British writers like Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, as the spectre of regression so unimaginable within the reigning cultural narrative of the time that its nightmarish possibility may be repressed by the very same spectacle of apocalyptic carnage used to figure it.

Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction

This chapter examines the ‘Lost World’ genre, a staple of late-Victorian popular fiction, exemplified by H. Rider Haggard’s stories featuring Allan Quatermain, and Ayesha, known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. These fin-de-siècle tales, while ostensibly celebrating British Imperialism and the continuation of colonial power, reveal layers of anxiety concerning degeneration, the collapse of civilisation, the rise of the Victorian ‘new woman’, and perhaps most potently the fear of death. Canadian writer James De Mille, in his book A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, inverted Victorian values to satirise the capitalist economy, and the glorification of war, by creating the Lost World of the Kosekin where wealth is a burden and death worshipped. The presentation of the Lost World as a Gothic Space allows for a critical examination of the way that Victorian cultural certainties were challenged, by divergent belief systems, and the mystery and terror of death.

Entranced by death: Horace Smith’s Mesmerism

Blending aspects of the religious novel with Gothic motifs, Horace Smith’s 1845 novel Mesmerism: A Mystery employs mesmerism to make its case for a radical transvaluation of death. Prematurely spiritualised by mesmeric treatment, the protagonist Jane Harvey attains a preternatural awareness of the liminal space between life and death, and, in the novel’s affirmative re-conception of the Death and the Maiden motif, she repeatedly encounters a mysterious phantom that proves to be the mildly uncanny yet enticing embodiment of death itself. The text evokes the ‘mistaken terror of death’ in order to dispel it and enthusiastically affirms both the Evangelical ‘good death’ and what Phillipe Ariès calls the ‘beautiful death’. However, in its disproportionate emphasis on death per se, and its polemical drive to reconceive death as ‘The Universal Friend’, the novel flirts with the heterodoxy that its personified Death is the principal redeemer of humankind.

‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’: Charles Bonnet and William Blake’s illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave (1808)

This chapter discusses William Blake’s response to Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789­98) and awareness of Charles Bonnet’s ideas about the afterlife in order to highlight the complexity of Blake’s illustrations to the new edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave published by R. H. Cromek in 1808. Blake was extremely fond of drawing souls. It is, however, often impossible to tell a rendering of living soul from a dead one. This chapter examines Blake’s relationship with the Gothic’s preoccupation with death and dying and explains, via the European context, how the impact of Blake’s images supersedes the Gothic and visual quality of language of Blair’s text. Blake’s drawings of the spiritual are not spontaneous sketches but evidence for his awareness of Lavater’s physiognomical theory and specifically the European debate about the immortality of the soul.

‘I’m not in that thing you know … I’m remote. I’m in the cloud’: networked spectrality in Charlie Brooker’s ‘Be Right Back’

‘Be Right Back’ (Black Mirror 2011-ongoing) fictionalises the possibility of reconstructing a deceased loved one based on posts to online social media sites as a means of managing grief. This chapter reads the episode according to a new theoretical framework, ‘networked spectrality’, which considers the relevant historical, technical, social, and political dynamics of digital networks as they relate to the concept of haunting. By paying attention to the affordances of networked publics, including the problems of context collapse in mediated social interactions, networked spectrality helps explore the significance of Ash as an enduring multiplicity of haunting and the uncanny in the lives of Martha and their daughter. As an allegory of contemporary media use, networked spectrality offers an approach to consider the implications of mediated remains and technical persistence in a society that tends to identify and articulate such encounters as spectral.

Modernity’s fatal addictions: technological necromancy and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire

Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.

Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people

The Gothic has become a dominant mode in children’s and young adult fiction published in the past decade. This chapter considers how Sonya Hartnett’s The Ghost’s Child (2007), Chris Priestley’s Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror (2007), Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) all represent dead or ghostly children who, in diverse ways, work to critique or remedy adult actions, particularly through their interactions with history. Contemporary Gothic children’s literature is, this chapter argues, distinctly different from Gothic fictions for adults, which often represent children as the bearers of death. In contrast, Gothic children’s literature displaces the anxieties that ordinarily accompany the representation of child death in realist fiction.

Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir

This chapter maps the received tradition of the Gothic on to the Bollywood Gothic noir. The tradition, it is argued, as it comes to India, is mediated by both the literary Gothic and the pervasive power of the Hollywood film and Gothic noirs. The form that the Bollywood Gothic noir takes is a function of a compromise as the received Western literary and filmic Gothic is deployed to articulate a specifically Hindu narrative of reincarnation. Whereas the idea of an afterdeath in the Western Gothic carried as its basic affect the concept of the uncanny and was alarmingly anti-redemptive, reincarnation narrative postulated that the uncanny was a pre-given capable of recall. However, the presence of the filmic and the literary Gothic as part of a world-literary system now disturbs the seamless and affirmative narrative of Hindu reincarnation by introducing the darker side of karmic retribution.