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still alive and about to remarry, with the tell-tale top of his finger missing. At the end of the novel, Captain Vampire is promoted to General by the Tsar. ‘The suspicious old dowagers’ remain convinced that he died at the siege of Gravitza, leaving just a ‘cadaver, temporarily reanimated by a breath of infernal life’ (p. 150). Nizet might have acquired the idea for her undead soldier
communal identity to contemporary vampirism that marks the Undead as a segment of society, rather than as isolated outcasts. Following Anne Rice’s family vampire groups in The Vampire Chronicles ( 1976 –2003), in True Blood vampires live together in ‘nests’, a term that implies a sense of community and nurturing. Moreover, The American Vampire League organisation lobbies for equal rights for vampires
target of the vampires and werewolves who wish to access it. Thus Elena’s circumstances are very much linked to her maternal heritage, as her biological links to Katherine and Isobel have effectively driven the narrative arc to date. Katherine is more than a matriarch, however; she is the undead mirror to Elena. They are not just lookalikes (as in Smith’s novels) but are identical. Indeed, in the Season
twenty-three-year-old woman from Ireland who had been training in Paris as a governess. He diagnosed her paroxysms as the result of ‘peripheral irritation’ (p. 79), for which his solution was clitoridectomy. Before the operation, the patient not only attacked the surgeon but also wanted to bite off the matron’s hand. In the manner of the undead, she refused food, preferring blood. Following a seizure
‘Dark ecology’ is the term recently coined by critic Timothy Morton to describe our profoundly interconnected coexistence in a world poised on the brink of environmental catastrophe. 1 Morton's vision of ‘nature’ as morbid, enmeshed modes of being has more in common, he tells us, ‘with the undead than with life’, 2 and his thinking might provide a new sense of the gothic as a genre full of dark environmental resonance. In
estates are shown to embody the price paid locally for failures in global economic policy, the domestic sphere having become an anxious and unstable space, and its inhabitants mere ghosts of a future that never came to pass. Part IV. Crossing borders As the seductive yet deadly figure of the undead-yet-living vampire attests, the gothic has long walked the line between modes of
with the Gothic’s emphasis on self-loss and the non-self-identicality of the subject. Put enigmatically, I will argue for Aristotelian vitality’s ‘undeadness’ in relation to modernist Gothic fiction. 8 Aristotle’s theory of vitality is expressed in the doctrine of the tripartite soul, which defines life in terms of the vegetative, sensitive (or animal) and rational
Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.
Chapter 3 , ‘Swedish Gothic and the demise of the welfare state’, Sofia Wijkmark examines how contemporary Swedish Gothic relates to the dismantling of the Swedish welfare system, and how the welfare state is described in terms of horror in Lindqvist's novels Hanteringen av odöda (2005; Handling the Undead ) and Rörelsen. Den andra platsen ( 2015 ; The Movement. The Other Place ), and Mats Strandberg's novel Hemmet ( 2017 ; The Home ). The two authors explore the failures of the welfare state in different ways. Lindqvist's novels often explicitly refer to or
’ (5.3.43–7). Mind-shattered, Lady Macbeth, like Isabella wakened from sleep, rises from bed, functions in the space of nightmare, walks in her sleep – and like Isabella, re-performs the past, talking to the unseen, the undead dead, shards of conversation cutting up her brain. The animal wail of anguish from Isabella – ‘O!’ – is lengthened by Lady Macbeth: ‘O, O, O!’ (5.1.43). The herbs that fail to