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, instead greeting each appalling plot turn with a resigned shrug. 7 Characteristics of the Gothic (in the portrayal of pervasive parental authority, the sudden irruption of doom-laden events, and the dis-empowered hero) are treated humorously in writer-director Ruane’s debut feature. The black comedy and splatstick elements incorporated alongside the contemporary, multicultural context make Death in Brunswick a key example of the modernisation and modification of the Gothic aesthetic in later popularised forms
, resurrecting the materials of the past – castles, folk belief, feudalism – to critique contemporary claims to rationality, progress, and civility, the benchmarks of modernity in Enlightenment thought. Robert Miles thus suggests that “the Gothic aesthetic sets up, as one of its poles, contemporary decadence, a ‘modernity’” defined by “fashion” and “effeminate culture,” 1 while Dale Townshend and
. Peg, the narrator of The Haunted River , makes a living as an artist. Her reflections on her art suggest abstract associations with the ghost story and a more general sense of an artist’s place within a wider market. She decides to paint an abandoned mill on the edge of what turns out to be a haunted river and applies a Gothic aesthetic as she wanders ‘about the ruined building, trying to decide from
the same sorts of questions and concerns – rather than in the depiction of particular sorts of monsters and villains. While my focus is the gothic aesthetic rather than television series as marketed commodities, it is worth stressing the ways in which these gothic series demonstrate the inexactness of the industry’s ideas of its audience’s tastes and interests. The most long
play’s offended parties. As the Gothic aesthetic insists (through its idealisation of Romance) these taboos are rationally rooted in a providential nature, supporting political and familial legitimacy’ (p. 119) while Clery finds the play resistant to its contemporaneous political hegemony. 29 Samuel
politics. In drawing – sometimes explicitly and self-consciously; other times subconsciously – on melodrama and the Gothic aesthetic, the hallmark of sentimental radicalism was an excess of feeling. Hence the use of these lenses – especially the Gothic – to explore the affective politics of the Tory-radical factory reformer and anti-Poor Law campaigner Richard Oastler in chapter 4 , and Feargus O’Connor in
were not good with women. That is why, although I thought they were wonderful, I had to give them up in the end. [...] I knew I wanted my fair share of the imagination, too. Not an excessive amount, mind; I wasn’t greedy. Just an equal share in the right to vision’ (‘AW’ 512). Shadow Dance and Love reveal how surrealism, as part of a broader European Gothic aesthetic, often envisages femininity