Jillian Wingfield turns to the events at the Villa Diodati in 1816. She shows how, alongside Byron’s conjuration and Polidori’s later development of the charismatic and aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven, Mary Shelley shaped the pseudo-science behind her patchwork creature in Frankenstein. Since then, the link between these Gothic stalwarts has evolved to a point where, two centuries after Polidori’s glamorous parasite was summoned into being, the genre of vampire fiction has soundly assimilated science. This essay discusses the effects of evolutionary manipulation in Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) as twenty-first-century exemplars of this ‘vampensteinian’ conjunction of the supernatural and cod science. Through this, Cronin and Butler invite a questioning of genetic modification, otherness, and racial prejudice, upending the aristocratic singularity started by Polidori. Consequently, Wingfield argues that this conjunction suggests the need for a twenty-first-century revision of Gothic taxonomy, amalgamating what has been a Polidorian paradigm into the novel nomenclature of the vampensteinian.
Nick Groom develops his earlier work on the influence of The Vampyre on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Both were conceived at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816, and Frankenstein has deep affinities with the vampire lore that was evidently aired during conversations between Lord, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Claire Clairmont, and Polidori. But the influence was also reciprocal, and Frankenstein echoes through Polidori’s tale in unexpected ways. The character Aubrey has often been seen as a self-portrait of Polidori while it is generally accepted that the vampire Lord Ruthven is an audacious attack on Byron, who employed Polidori as his personal physician. However, in this chapter Groom presents a radical and unsettling close reading of the character of Aubrey, informed by Mary Shelley’s presentation of Victor Frankenstein, arguing that the relationship between Aubrey and Ruthven is far more complex and uncanny than has hitherto been recognised.
In February 1902 a short notice in the London Times announced the intention of the authorities at Westminster Cathedral to conduct a tuning concert, the third in a series of large-scale experiments on the still uncompleted cathedral’s acoustic properties. Coverage of the first experiment, undertaken the previous summer, had been largely confined to the Catholic newspaper the Tablet. As the programme expanded, however, details began to filter with increasing regularity into the national press. Intended to showcase the effect of the new cathedral’s architecture on a particular musical style, the experiments capitalised on the specific acoustic context of the building to play with perception, creating ghost chords and ethereal effects. As a large-scale musical-acoustic experiment, the concerts were to resonate in the worlds of science and architecture for the next five decades, prompting a particular trajectory of scientific development and architectural innovation. This chapter explores those experiments and the role of Westminster Cathedral as a space for science and music. It examines the significance of the cathedral as a conceptual platform for further development in architecture, acoustics, and music, most publicly expressed in the renowned tuning concerts which informed the design of Royal Festival Hall in 1951.
With ‘El comienzo del fin’, Bartolomé’s auteurist ‘signature’ remains perfectly legible across both film and television media. The chapter argues that the aesthetic attention to documentary, humour and music in the television episode makes it typical of the director’s work. ‘El comienzo del fin’ thus denounces Francoism and claims feminism, the twin creative commitments of Bartolomé’s career, while also adopting a relatively accessible format, deploying documentary techniques and employing humour, the three formal traits of her signature. Accessibility for audiences is ensured partly by interweaving historical events with a selection of seventeen previously broadcast events in the lives of the Alcántara family. Second, Bartolomé’s belief in documentary, to which she brings her own feminist ‘street’ aesthetic of combining interviews with well-known interlocutors and interviews with anonymous members of the public on the street, is fundamental. Third, Bartolomé’s trademark humour, which we have seen throughout this book, is also evident in her ability to select archive footage and pinpoint the amusing phrase or sequence in longer recordings, and in her ability to make mischievous meaning from choices in mise en scène, camera work, editing and extra-diegetic music.
This chapter explores the potential of Northern wetlands to interrogate established imagined geographies of the Arctic. Throughout the chapter, we maintain a dialogue between scientific discourse and moving images, arguing that wetlands are spaces of ambiguity and ambivalence in both; they are construed as both threatening and threatened, and they resist comprehension and incorporation into dominant knowledge systems and the space of the nation-state. The chapter begins by exploring scientific discourse about Northern wetlands in the context of climate change and the carbon cycle. We then draw upon this scientific discourse in our analysis of filmic and televisual mediations of wetlands and their communities: the Finnish-Swedish drama Elina (2002), the Finnish horror film Sauna (2008), the Russian thriller/supernatural television series Topi (2021), and the Sámi short horror film Eahpáraš (2011). In Western imaginaries, wetlands have a long history of being associated with disease, dirt, and the monstrous (Giblett 1996). However, during the eighteenth century, they were given more positive attributes, becoming a sign of fertility, beauty, or utility (Howarth 1999). In Arctic cultures, furthermore, wetlands have long been seen as homelands connected to Indigenous livelihoods. Wetlands thus remain a sign of ambiguity and multiple meanings, making them unstable but rich. The shifting meanings of wetlands also shape the scientific and screen mediations that are the focus of this chapter. These mediated wetlands are spaces of in-betweenness and plurality, complex cultural and nonhuman ecosystems that help us pluralise how we understand the Arctic.
This chapter investigates fantasies of ice in twenty-first-century animated film, foregrounding the ‘plasmatic’ potential of the medium (Heise 2014) to think about the agency of ice in the Anthropocene. Taking as one of its premises the metonymic relationship between ice and the Arctic, the chapter examines contemporary fantasies of ice in relation to climate change, gender, and Indigenous epistemologies. It traces changing imaginaries of ice in recent animation, such as the Ice Age films (2002–2016) and the Russian The Snow Queen series (2012–2018), before offering a close analysis of Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Frozen II (2019). In highlighting the dynamic agency and other potentialities of ice, Frozen and Frozen II powerfully (if ambivalently) express both Arctic Indigenous communities’ ‘right to be cold’ (Watt-Cloutier 2015) and the urgency of climate action. In animated film, the depiction of ice involves two kinds of mediation operating at different levels. First, ice becomes an influential medium that shapes the narratives, communicates nonhuman forces, and mediates human agency. Elsa’s ability to create ice in Frozen, readable as a fantasy of either climate change denial or climate change reversal, exemplifies this dynamic force. The second level is the films’ own technology of animation, which offers the possibility of new landscapes from one frame to the next. In the era of climate change, these two levels of mediation can be seen as fundamentally intertwined. In the Frozen films, they express multiple cryocultures connected to different forms of empowerment, agency, memory, reconciliation, and social justice.
This chapter portrays the life story of Henry Simon. Employing a close reading of Henry’s correspondence, it draws out his character as a hard-working engineer and philanthropist. As well as illustrating his private family life, the chapter explores his firm moral principles and liberal beliefs and their antecedents. In this vein, it explores the influence of Henry’s uncle, Heinrich Simon, as well as Henry’s interest in eastern religion. The chapter demonstrates Henry’s integral position in Manchester’s German community and his role in enriching the city’s civic institutions.