Search results
disturbing characteristics. His power to rejuvenate himself and to transform into a dog, a bat or swirling mist questions the very notion of a stable identity. A postmodern audience might be more comfortable with Dracula’s unfixed, mutating shape and appreciative of the work of generations of film-makers who have persistently resurrected Stoker’s truly un-dead vampire in fittingly
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
to the Romanian Strigoi (undead) and the Portuguese Bicho-papão (a bogeyman or Krampus-type figure) Europe was full of fertile figures of fear. The ensuing Middle Ages was full of the dread of the lingering terror of what lay in the great beyond, enflamed by biblical warnings, and aggravated by the horrors of ergot poisoning. 36 In the theatre, Shakespeare and his Elizabethan or Jacobean contemporaries created their own darkly imagined vistas. In Doctor Faustus , Christopher Marlowe pre-dated Goethe by warning
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
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