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with certainties, albeit in contrasting ways. By contrast, in my final cluster of examples, a clinical necropoetics is used with a different emphasis, managing uncertainty by creating a liminal space using highly Gothicised tropes, yet emptied of horror. In this, these texts exemplify the cultural trend mentioned earlier, for Gothic to increasingly lack the affective charge of earlier uses. Numerous terms for the cadaveric donor were coined between 1966 and 1997, at conferences and in journal articles exploring the new deaths. At the CIBA Foundation Conference on
, ‘Cleopatra Lilyised’. According to the writer, Langtry appears as ‘a pretty woman dressed up for a fancy ball’ who ‘hankers after the coins and bangles and the Egyptian frippery of Cleopatra’, simply imitating Bernhardt. 84 While Bernhardt has not lived up to the original Cleopatra, the writer believes that Bernhardt possesses the ‘sinuousness’, ‘grace’, ‘variety’ and ‘charm’ needed to perform the role well. 85 Ultimately, ‘Cleopatra is a woman, … a grand creature’, and
imagined and real, resisting the trend to present dysfunctions of tissue economies as wholly distant from these sites in time or place. I explore texts which occupy complex transnational positions, including, for example, Trinidadian-American Gothic science fiction making use of non-Eurocentric spiritual traditions, and a play by an Indian author written in English for a European competition. Glennis Byron has coined the neologism ‘globalgothic’, to indicate how Eurocentric Gothic and horror vernaculars are transformed in dialogue with other cultural traditions of
intricate networks of pressure within local and particular milieux of transfer, intra-national processes and flows, diasporic dimensions of tissue mobilities, organ trafficking, and transplant tourism. 20 Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby coin the term ‘clinical labor’ to describe situations in which bodies are incorporated into biomedical industry, such as some forms of organ or tissue sale or pharmaceutical experimentation. ‘Clinical labour’ is by definition of asymmetrical benefit to corporation and subject, bioindustrial organisations profiting while the subject
In his 1974 article ‘Harvesting the dead’, Willard Gaylin imagines a near-future in which brain-dead bodies are stored in warehouses for organ extraction and medical experimentation. He writes that these bodies may seem indistinguishable from patients in deep coma and that the sites may look identical to hospital wards. To mark the way these bodies and spaces will not be what they appear, he coins two terms: the brain-dead are ‘neomorts’, and the place that houses them is a ‘bioemporium’. 1 The semantic field of transactionality informs the whole article
; Tennyson was a poet of ‘sensation’, like Keats, in Hallam's opinion, with a ‘tendency of imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe’ (Hallam 1831 : 617). Poets of sensation ‘are not descriptive; they are picturesque’ (617). Picturesque was not loaded with the same freight in 1831 as it had been in 1768 when William Gilpin coined the term as ‘that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’ ( 1768 : 2), partly because the picture had changed. Human dwellers in the Gothic landscapes of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe were placed
. That sense of estrangement opens up another, productive way of rereading Collins's use of the Gothic. The idea of a once-familiar, even comforting, but now strange and withdrawn reality finds its correspondence in the concept of hantologie , a term coined by Jacques Derrida to describe an irreducible ‘element’ that belongs neither to life nor death ( 1994 : 63). As Colin Davis has explained, hauntology ‘supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither
of which are not only European but English, are all connected by their inability to provide a stable backdrop for events and beings, human or otherwise. These gardens seem to conspire with or against their human guardians, or to be placed in such an invidious position that they cannot thrive, resorting to resentful decay and wilful disorder instead, with a distinctly un-gradual accumulation of triggers for anxious displacement and disturbance. As Heather Sullivan notes in Chapter 1 – using her own coining, ‘the Gothic green’ – many of these tales appear to
with images of colonial otherness’. 9 This type of Gothic is often referred to, using a term coined from Patrick Brantlinger's expression, as ‘Imperial Gothic’, and it typically relies on Orientalist xenophobic plots that revolve around invasions by a non-European, non-normative Other who threatens the stability of the society and the categories made possible by, and sustaining, imperialism. 10 There are such Nordic Gothic texts, as will be discussed below. However
Ministers coupled their exhortations on the threat of demonic temptations with lamentations of the depraved natures of humankind. The two were sides of the same coin, one enabling the other, a dangerous pairing for godly men and women hoping for closer communion with God. As Robert Bruce described in a sermon in 1591, Satan ‘insinuates himself in our affections by reason of the corruption that is in us’. 41 Perhaps the most evocative description of the relationship between human corruption and demonic wiles came from a mid-seventeenth-century minister who explained to