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Originally published in Dan North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 53–69. I Am Legend : on (and off) screen ‘Begone! Van Helsing and Mina and Jonathan and blood-eyed Count and all.’ ( The Night Creatures ) The story of the relation between the vampire novel I Am Legend (1954) and horror cinema is, to put it mildly, convoluted. It begins in
controversial. This chapter is concerned with a third type of prophecy: sayings attributed to figures from Europe’s past, enlisted to make claims about Europe’s future. Most scholars have reserved the term ‘political prophecy’ for these pronouncements, following Rupert Taylor in his 1911 catalogue of them. 2 Several collections of these prophecies circulated in early modern Britain. Attributed to seers like Robert Nixon and Mother Shipton, they exhorted people to embrace political causes. 3 Scotland had the most famous compilation. Constructed in the sixteenth century
proffered his letter of introduction. The subsequent meeting between the two is then appropriately structured as a righteous rebuff to the Scot's hubris as much as to his dismissive intolerance. Customarily, Gordon is humiliated, vanquished in his own lecture theatre, and formally stripped of his anonymity as Spurzheim refutes, point by point, the allegations made in Edinburgh Review . Spurzheim, victorious, goes on to influence and inspire the impressionable George Combe, who in turn becomes the indigenous savant of choice for the further promulgation of British
what appears to be an inhospitable terrain, with their work taking on an accordingly defensive tone. Nowhere is this unease more evident than in the various critical responses provoked by British horror cinema over the years. From the outraged to the laudatory, these responses are part of the baggage which British horror inevitably brings with it to any critical discussion. If we are to move beyond some of the less helpful long-standing assumptions about horror and towards a more systematic understanding of this
Concerns of linguistic, cultural and military incursion from France emerge more frequently in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. In the literary arena, one of the ways in which these concerns are marked is through the highly-contested national stakes of chivalry. This essay argues that these national stakes of chivalry are negotiated in the realm of the Gothic romance in a particularly fluid and dynamic manner. Addressing recent critical assumptions about the conservatism inherent in prose treatments of medieval chivalry, the essay explores the possibility that Gothic romance recuperates a more positive version of chivalry in the wake of the famous Burke/Wollstonecraft revolutionary debate of 1790.
In this article, I propose that the key to the underlying dissidence of M. G. Lewis‘s The Monk lies in the novel s depiction of consent, a fundamental principle in late eighteenth-century British discourse. For British thinkers of all stripes, a government and populace that valued consent made Britain the greatest nation in the world; The Monk disrupts this worldview by portraying consent, whether express or tacit, political or sexual, as incoherent. By depicting consent as illegible and pervasively undermining the distinction between consent and coercion, The Monk effectually threatens a value that rested at the core of late eighteenth-century British identity.
The following considers Richard Marsh’s 1897 gothic novel The Beetle in relation to fin-de-siècle anxieties, specifically sexual deviancy, empire, and venereal disease. While the domestic Contagious Diseases Acts had been revealed in the 1880s, continued high rates of VD amongst British soldiers in particular continued the debate as to who was responsible for spreading diseases such as syphilis both at home and abroad. At a time of ‘colonial syphiliphobia’, to extend Showalter’s term, The Beetle suggests the necessity of regulating venereal disease in the Empire to protect Britain’s ‘racial superiority’ and conservatively warns against the potential consequences of dabbling with the sexually ‘deviant’ and dangerous Orient.
Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914 by Nicholas Daly; Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys
The Gothic or “Goth” subculture emerged from Britains punk scene during the early 1980s. The music associated with the movement showed a sophisticated handling of themes and aesthetics associated with Gothicism, proving that the Goth adjective was more than just a fanciful label given to the bands by the music industry and the popular press. In order to gain a greater understanding of what is genuinely Gothic about this body of music, this study investigates Goth from a musicological perspective exploring specific techniques that were used by the artists, and examining the reasons why Gothicism appealed to many British youths during the Thatcher-era.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has become a cult series. The show has been broadcast worldwide and vampire Spike has been travelling around the world; or rather his translated version has, reaching many destinations. In France there are two translated versions of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, one dubbed and the other subtitled. This article examines the significance of Spikes Britishness against the American background where he lives. The analysis considers his performance in the original and in the translation to show how British Spike ‘sounds’ in French. The article ultimately reflects on Spikes vampiric otherness and how translation might be used to efface or reduce otherness.