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arises: What happens to the Gothic when the genre enters a different definition of afterdeath where the latter is defined not as an instance of the demonic in us (the figure of the impure, the unsanctified, the satanic ‘undead’) but as a principle of rebirth and reincarnation that informs the Hindu way of life? When, in India’s greatest epic, the Mahābhārata
establishment of transcendental subjectivity, of which the uncanny presents the surprising counterpart. Ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead, etc., flourish in an era when you might expect them to be dead and buried, without a place. They are something brought about by modernity itself. (7) The uncanny, less a return
dislocated national subject’ . In Goth: Undead Subculture, eds Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby. Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 217–30 . Hale , Terry. 2002 . ‘French and German gothic: The beginnings’ . In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 63–84 . Hodkinson , Paul
the vampire, popularised by lurid accounts translated for British journals from the mid-eighteenth century. 10 That the word ‘vampire’ had gained a conventional and an accessible metaphorical function by 1765 indicates the potential for the un-dead to function as an image in political and social critique with equal felicity to its literary deployment as a locus of supernatural horror. 11 As a suicide – or, indeed, as a vampire, for the predatory un-dead are on occasions associated with
exacerbates existing postcolonial anxieties around housing and security in Ireland to create these haunted estates, sites of anxiety that recall older Irish cultural memories of dispossession and ruin. To quote Fintan O’Toole: ‘When the past is “now”, the artistic genre that cannot be escaped is the gothic. It is the form of ghosts, revenants, the undead – embodiments of the past
anodyne and undead. In such an impoverished world, one’s subjectivity is significantly defined by work, just as the business of being a vampire and feeding itself defines the vampire’s life. Work eats its worker, devouring his flesh and his time; it is slowly substituted for his body. This
with any other living (or for that matter undead) creature. For example, the film begins with Neville dictating into a tape recorder, an activity that even he acknowledges is pointless: ‘I know there’s no one left but me but I set this down anyway: my history. Maybe, someday, someone will listen to it. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.’ 13 There are also some lengthy voice-overs which again offer exposition and are also used to compress the lengthy timespan of Neville’s scientific experiments on
ledgers and railway timetables of Dracula , it is only when this disparate, very modern, assemblage of information is unified that the undead can be tracked. Indeed, in the heady urban centres of Victorian Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century commodities became desirably and deliriously phantasmagorical, immaterial and fleeting, like the negatives and shadows that flickered on screen or crackled on
. 4 Bernstein, Basil, ‘On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’, in M. F. D. Young (editor) Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (London: Collier Macmillan), 1971, p. 56. 5 Lütticken, Sven, ‘Undead
(1992) has even been called ‘the end of Gothic’ by Fred Botting, who shows how its romanticism ‘presents its figures of humanity in attenuated and resigned anticipation of an already pervasive absence, undead, perhaps, but not returning’ ( 1996 , 180). Fay Weldon, whose own intertextual connectedness to Shelley as well as to the vampire myth has always played out the (neo