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This volume explores how current ideas about ecocriticism can be applied to Gothic narratives in order to help draw out their often dystopian ecological visions. The book argues that, from chilling Victorian panoramas to films such as Frankenstein or The Thing, the Arctic looms large as a blank screen on which fantasies of Gothic entrapment may be projected. It explores selected tales of Algernon Blackwood showing some ways in which Blackwood blurs the distinctions between the human world and a wider natural and spiritual ecology. The book examines the seventeenth-century New England Puritan influence on later Gothic representations of the natural world in North America. It provides an overview of recent studies on the American Gothic which highlight the notion of the wilderness as an ideological lens through which early settlers viewed the strange landscape they found themselves in. The book argues that, from its origins, women's Gothic fiction has undermined fictions of the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the unnatural by creating worlds in which the everyday is collapsed with the nightmarish. The book is the first to explore the Gothic through theories of ecocriticism. The structure of the volume broadly follows national trends, beginning with a British tradition, and moving through a Canadian context. It also follows through a specifically American model of the ecoGothic, before concluding with Deckard's discussion of a possible global context which could overcome national variations.
The body is a potential marker of monstrosity, identifying those who do not fit into the body politic. Irregularity and the grotesque have been associated with Gothic architecture and are also indicative of wayward flesh and its deformities. Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. Original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts include The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies will be traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. Dangerous Bodies demonstrates how the Gothic corpus is haunted by a tangible sense of corporeality, often at its most visceral. Chapters set out to vocalise specific body parts such as skin, genitals, the nose and eyes, as well as blood. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.
looking at the spectres lying ahead. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a warning against future anarchy being unleashed on the world as a result of the man-made monster of slavery. Her scientist hero is increasingly apprehensive that, if his male and female monster were to depart to a remote desert in the New World, they would ‘thirst’, vampire-like, to propagate ‘a race of devils’, foment
makeshift cinema in the town hall, where they will watch James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). The impression that the film leaves on Ana is particularly profound, and she will come to interpret the wider world of family, politics and social relations through the prism of a monstrous fiction and excited imagination. We see Ana with her fellow pupils in an anatomy class at school; we also see her befriend a
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
thought of as signifiers of disorientation in imaginaries of progress, markers for that which cannot easily be assigned to one side of the binary or the other, perhaps cannot even be properly categorised at all because they too are unknown, like the warnings placed over the uncharted portion of an incomplete map. To illustrate these points more clearly in the discussion that follows, we will draw upon both the Frankenstein story, as one of the original monsters in the socio-technical imaginary of progress through science, and more recent metaphors from popular culture
Venice (1851–53), Ruskin argues that ‘It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men: – Divided into segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life.’ 3 This contrasts with the more holistic approach to nature taken by the Romantics. However, it is the image of fragments which seems to persist in the Gothic and it meets its clearest expression in Victor Frankenstein’s
as expected, the reviews of British horror films become shorter in length as time passes. Linked with this, they also begin to use a recognisable shorthand based on the name of ‘Hammer’. For example, only two of the available reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) mention Hammer at all ( Sunday Express , 5/5/57, Evening News , 2/5/57). The reviews for Dracula (Fisher, 1958), released one year later, contain a few scattered references to the studio. A year after that we can
at the University of Manchester is the Latin motto Arduus ad solem (‘Striving towards the sun’). This Enlightenment credo refers to several myths – for instance, that of Icarus, who flew towards the sun and fell as the wax in his wings melted. Also lurking on this spot is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: ‘Rutherford’s room’, in Manchester University, has been investigated, as, in the past, some of those who inhabited offices above, below, and to the sides, died of cancer. In this we can read another old and strong myth related to Victor Frankenstein – that of
stacked top down, turns out to be an altogether more lateral beast. When traditional distinctions of up and down, inside and out are blurred, it is not always possible to distinguish self from monstrous Other. The identification between Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation is an obvious example. Dangerous bodies come in many packages, from repressive corporate bodies, to the abject, sacrificial