Haunted by ‘Lenore’: The Fragment as Gothic Form, Creative Practice and Textual Evolution

This article examines the processes of fragmentation and haunting surrounding the explosion of competing translations, in 1796, of Gottfried August Bürger's German ballad ‘Lenore’. While the fragment has become known as a core narrative device of the Gothic, less attention has been paid to the ways that the fragment and fragmentation operate as dynamic, living phenomena within the Gothic's central processes of memory, inspiration, creation, dissemination and evolution. Taking ‘Lenore’ as a case study, this essay aims to redress this critical gap by illuminating the ways that fragmentation haunts the mind, the text, and the history of the Gothic as a process as much as a product. It demonstrates that fragmentation operates along lines of cannibalism, resurrection and haunting to establish a pattern of influence that paves the way for modern forms of gothic intertextuality and adaptation. Importantly, it thereby locates fragmentation as a process at the heart of the Gothic mode.

Hearth and Home and Horror: Gothic Trappings in early C20th Latin American Short Fiction

The Gothic short form in Latin America has yet to receive focused scholarly attention. Yet, despite no early Gothic novel tradition to speak of, the Gothic mode emerged in poetry and short fiction, representing particular anxieties and colonial/postcolonial realities specific to the region owing in part to a significant increase in periodicals. Focusing on two case studies – Clemente Palma's ‘La granja blanca’ (Peru, 1904) and Horacio Quiroga's ‘El almohadón de plumas’ (Uruguay, 1917) – this article will explore how Latin American authors classified as modern, modernista, and criollista were experimenting with Gothic forms, adapting the design of the traditional Gothic novel to intensify its effect and reach a wider readership. Demonstrating a particular influence of Poe, a unity of effect is created, one that suggests that the home is a place of horrors, not comfort, and the uniquely horrifying settings and plot ultimately challenge established moral codes and literary tendencies.

Music Video Gothic: Fragmentary Form at the Dawn of MTV

This article argues that the modern music video at the dawn of the MTV era embraces a logic of the Gothic fragment. Mobilizing an archive of gothic archetypes of haunting and monstrosity, the music video of the early 1980s confronts anxieties about its unshaped aesthetic character and discursive placelessness and its strained connections to absent textual wholes, performance cultures, and marginalized histories. Through a close reading of four seminal music videos from this time period – The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star (1979), David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes (1980), Blondie's Rapture (1981), and Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983) – I argue that the early music video incarnates a tradition of production, circulation, and decoding that I want to call Music Video Gothic. This tradition expresses latent concerns about the music video's aesthetic borders and intertextual relations with cultural and career narratives.

Traveller's Tales: Rudyard Kipling's Gothic Short Fiction

Between 1884 and 1936, Rudyard Kipling wrote over 300 short stories, most of which were first published in colonial and cosmopolitan periodicals before being reissued in short-story collections. This corpus contains a number of critically neglected Gothic stories that fall into four groups: stories that belong to the ghost-story tradition; stories that represent the colonial encounter through gothic tropes of horror and the uncanny but do not necessarily include any supernatural elements; stories that develop an elegiac and elliptical Gothic Modernism; and stories that make use of the First World War and its aftermath as a gothic environment. This essay evaluates Kipling's contribution to the critically neglected genre of the Gothic short story, with a focus on the stories' persistent preoccupation with spatial tropes of travel, disorientation and displacement.