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the present, suggesting that man should acknowledge technological hubris and, like Victor Frankenstein, learn to recoil from the sweet poison of progress. Thus, instead of using projections into the future to mimic the temporal scale needed to turn ‘matters of fact’ into ‘matters of concern’, to use Latour’s concepts, the past surfaces as the spectral event warning and demands change without
I like period, legend, and allegory because they take you out of your personal present-day experience. After all, let’s face the fact: this is entertainment. And entertainment is escapism … Period vampire stories – even Frankenstein – are fairy tales. It is fantasy – grim fantasy, and grim fairy tale. That is a
Since 2012 there has been a noticeable trend in nineteenth-century-set gothic mysteries that take inspiration from history, myth, and fiction. These include Ripper Street (2012–2017), Dracula (2013–2014), Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–2017), and The Alienist (2018–). Often bringing together international casts, locations, and production companies, the shows
This is a book about the British film director Terence Fisher. A prolific film-maker with fifty titles to his credit, Fisher’s last film – Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell – was released in 1974, when I was twelve. I was not old enough to see any of the horror films upon which Fisher’s reputation rests when they were first released; for a number of them, I was not even born. I have been
Counterfactual obstetrics 6 •• Counterfactual obstetrics: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein Damian Walford Davies ‘Obstetrics’: from the Latin for ‘midwife’ – literally, ‘one who stands before/opposite/in the way of’ the woman in childbirth. As both heirs to and active deliverers of Romanticism’s inheritances, we are ourselves in an uncanny parturitive position. Assisting at the iterative, often difficult (re)births of literary texts, we participate in acts of critical midwifery. What follows is a provocation – a performance of a critical heuristic that is
The introductory chapter is written to help position the reader regarding the academic climate that saw the first edition of Hammer and Beyond materialise, to consider some of the book’s omissions, and to assess the state of British horror in the years immediately leading up to, and following, its publication.
-Kilvert, 1987 : I, 50). Science was spectacle engaging the audience visually, and Dr Frankenstein’s use of galvanism follows in Galvani’s nephew and assistant Giovanni Aldini’s footsteps, showing Shelley’s emphasis on science as (visual) performance. Shelley’s novel was a source of inspiration to many Victorian writers rewriting gothic topoi. As a case in point, Wilkie
According to its director, Terence Fisher, The Gorgon (1964) was not a horror film at all, but a romantic fairy tale and ‘frustrated love story’ (Ringel, 1975a : 24). Although the film is set in Hammer’s usual stylised middle Europe, the Gorgon herself derives not from Gothic literature, like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, but from classical mythology – unfamiliar
constructions of paternity to which it gives form. Through an account of Foucault’s later turn towards ethics, Townshend’s chapter concludes with a focus upon the easily overlooked ethical dimensions to the queerness of the masculine Gothic mode. In recent years there has been a steady proliferation of academic publications addressing the extent to which Frankenstein (1831) can be
had an infantilising effect on the arts and literature in particular. The present market for Goth and Gothic toys both for children and adults is prodigiously large, with the influence of the nineteenth-century texts of Frankenstein and Dracula (and all their subsequent spin-offs in terms of films, TV, bowdlerisations and parodies) still being felt in this market. Though I discuss dolls in