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Blake’s visual language systematically undermined Blair’s as it blurred the boundary between the literal and the figural and even distorted the boundaries of gender. The illustrations are uncanny because, rather than supporting the scenarios described by Blair, they create an alternative reality and tease viewers into confronting death (Freud, 1985 : 370–2). It is Blake’s Gothic aesthetic
the lifeless to the restless. In Blake's horrific narratives, disjointed organs inhabit a life of their own: ‘a foot, or a hand, or a head / Or a heart, or an eye, they swam mischevous / Dread terrors! delighting in blood’ ( BU 23:5–7; E 81). Typical of the Gothic aesthetic, the grotesqueness of this body imagery is so inflated that it collapses into the absurd. Indeed, Blake tends to use characteristics of the Gothic genre to comedic ends
simplistically as a clash between, on one hand, local families whose forbears are commemorated by the headstones and monuments and, on the other, costumed visitors and lifetime Goths insisting on their own freedoms, it also encapsulates another type of conflict between different interpretations of Gothic aesthetic visibility. Photographers such as Simon Marsden and Paul Koudounaris stress their reverence for the
words ‘fall into a configuration’ (55) with Mariana's largely self-imposed state of physical and emotional immobility, and also with the picturesque Gothic aesthetic that allows for fantastic conjurations. Measure for Measure creates more problems here than it solves: Mariana does, eventually, marry Angelo who had rejected her for so many years, but under such strange circumstances that one might expect her to refuse. However, John Stuart Mill considers the Shakespearean relevance to be nominal; we should only ‘retain’ the moated grange ‘and a solitary dweller
manner of the Gothic aesthetic) . She grants that the modern novel is a debased form of romance, one luxuriating in the depiction of contemporary decadence, and ought to be controlled; but romance, proper, is not to be tarred with the same brush. She recruits Cervantes to her cause, noting that the noble character of the deluded Don is ‘more respectable, and more amiable’ than characters ‘wholly immersed
seen as ‘key examples of the difficult progress of the Enlightenment in Spanish cultural history’. (Significantly, both Blanco-White and Goya eventually chose to live in exile.) Concluding with an analysis of some of Goya’s murals, Curbet suggests that in these late works we see the Spanish painter questioning the very nature of human rationality: that is, moving beyond the Gothic aesthetic towards an
) Morella is associated with an anti-aesthetic (which is opposed to ‘beauty’), and Poe attempts to challenge this Gothic aesthetic even whilst he works within it. Beauty is linked to melancholy grief, which bestows a paradoxical pleasure in which the subject is, as Poe states in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, ‘impelled ... by the human thirst for self-torture’ (p. 491). However, the narrator does not
Maternal Muse Analysing Poe’s Gothic aesthetic in ‘Through a Text Backwards’, Carter posits that ‘the elements’ in his ‘voluptuous tales of terror’ are over-determined (‘TTB’ 482). Poe’s theatricality, she suggests, ensures we know all the time that the scenery is card-board, the blade of the axe is silver paint
auteur status while aligning the studio itself with the American studio era. Pirie saw Hammer operating as a ‘mini-major’ in a dilution of the early Hollywood mode of production ( A Heritage of Horror 43). The auteur theory was still being codified in the 1970s, and, seeing critically derided director Terence Fisher as the hand that shaped Hammer’s Gothic aesthetic, Pirie was keen to be the first to resituate Fisher as an artist (Ibid. 49, 52). To assert Fisher’s status, Pirie used the incipient auteur theories of Andrew Sarris and Peter Wollen, utilising their tenets
not as a cleanly defined unit, but as a more diffuse entity, one that might be resistant to the molarising action of dividualisation. This potential shifts into especially sharp focus if we consider the extent to which, since its inception, gothic has evinced a deep suspicion of boundary-driven thought. While the gothic aesthetic has witnessed various changes throughout its two-century-long history