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This essay explores the influence of the theological tradition of privation theory upon Richard Marsh‘s novel The Beetle (1897). Focusing on images of ontological nothingness, corruption and uncreation, it argues that the novel employs the concept of privation both in its depiction of the supernatural Other and in its parallel interrogation of its contemporary modernity. Imagery of privation in the novel is associated not only with the Beetle itself, but with the modern urban environment and weapons of mass destruction. The essay concludes by examining the corruption of language and absence of a creative logos able to respond adequately to the privations of the modern city and industrial economy.
Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall have argued rather convincingly that ‘Gothic Criticism’ is in need of an overhaul. I revisit their controversial article through an analysis of Oscar Wilde’s parody of the Gothic and of scholarship, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ In this tale of creative criticism, Wilde’s hero, Cyril Graham, invents the character of Willie Hughes to prove a theory about Shakespeare’s sonnets. Contrary to Baldick and Mighall, I argue that Gothic criticism might do well to take its cue from its object of study. Plunging deep into the abyss, abandoning pretentions of knowing fact from fiction, natural from supernatural, I whole-heartedly - momentarily - consider the ‘Willie Hughes theory’ and ‘I will take up the theory where Cyril Graham left it and I will prove to the world that he was right’.
Liberty, a term dear to the Enlightenments emancipatory project, has long been a key concept in the Gothic. No branch of the Gothic more powerfully or creatively examines the complexities of the liberty question than the Gothic pharmography – a narrative chronicling drug/alcohol seduction and addiction. Drawing on three novelistic sub-genres – the Oriental tale, the imperial Gothic, and the Urban Gothic – the Gothic pharmography coalesces several distinct nineteenth-century debates – the nature of the will and liberal individualism; social oppression and conformity; urban and national degeneration; and British imperialist expansion, which involved the perceived anxiety-inducing sense of Britains growing economic dependence on the non-Western world. This essay offers an overview of the Gothic pharmography from the late eighteenth century through to the fin de siècle in Marie Corelli‘s Wormwood.
This paper explores the Gothic videogame Limbo (PlayDead, 2010) in terms of an aesthetic and conceptual precariousness and preoccupation with uncertainty that, I suggest, are particularly associated with the traumatic legacy of 9/11. It engages with Judith Butler s post-9/11 reflections in her work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) on the loss of presumed safety and security in the First World. From here, she expresses the potential for shared experiences of vulnerability to inaugurate an ethics of relationality, without recourse to investment in systems of security. I then contrast this with an alternative critical trajectory that emphasises the use-value of such systems over a desire for moral purity. This critical framework is considered in relation to the treatment of vulnerability in Limbo, through its construction of a dialogic relationship between its diegetic game-world and the formal structure of its game-system. The former is found to articulate a pervasive experience of uncertainty, whilst the latter provides a sense of security. I draw upon psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott‘s theories of play and creative living to argue that the tension between game-world and game-system in Limbo creates a model of how uncertainty can be dwelt with, through a precarious balance between the use of systems of security and disengagement from them.
the expression in the past. The concept itself clearly derives from theological discourse; I shall suggest that its adaptation into popular belief may represent a pragmatic, creative response to increasing anxieties in interpreting supposed visions of and encounters with a supernatural other world, first in an era of growing clerical hegemony actively hostile to lay attempts to engage with occult powers and ever more concerned about the dangers of Satanic paction, then, subsequently, at a time of growing disbelief and derision concerning the very existence of such
concept of ‘stigmaphilia in a minor key’ to describe a particular creative or critical position which ‘deliberately draws close to the textures of pain, shame, and wounds, both stigma and stigmata’. 3 The term ‘stigmaphilia’ entered queer theory and disability studies as part of a joyful, transgressive reclamation of stigmatised positions as a substratum for resistance. 4 This process is vital and defiant and necessary. At times, however, it may mean that ‘painful and traumatic dimensions … have been minimised or disavowed’, as Heather Love warns, and ‘makes it harder
Gothic, as a creative medium and a way of seeing, allows us to question human ability to control events, people or even places. Any inquiry into human and nonhuman interaction is disturbing when control disintegrates, especially in the apparent safety of gardens, designed as areas of human dominance over wild nature, yet creating opportunities for uncanny deeds and presences. This collection is a unique interrogation of nineteenth-century gardens, literary and real, examining their many abilities to support and distort human–nonhuman material
fantasy and haunting. 122 Primarily, however, this book examines British and American Gothic alongside scientific and legislative developments within these countries that paralleled these creative works. An even broader international scope would risk irresponsibly simplifying subtleties of legislation, economics, tissue procurement practice, and healthcare economies, and reinforce the misleading view that disordered transfer is exclusively an issue in non-Western contexts. Cross-border transfer is far from the only aspect of tissue transfer characterised by
, however – which again locates the predation fundamentally elsewhere than the recipient’s home site – I will use the remainder of this chapter to problematise the distancing move that defensively situates predation as occurring elsewhere. I will examine North American and UK harvest horror, inflected by the transgenerational legacies of colonialism and slavery. As in Padmanabhan’s play, these creative works present organ predation as hallucinatory mimesis, symbolic of wider structural oppression and slow violence in which Black and Indigenous People of Colour may be
wife. It appears that a dark entity inhabits the lake and that this entity can enter the bodies of human beings. Currently, it inhabits the body of a Barbara Jagger, the woman who lured Alan and his wife to the island cabin. The lake into which Alice disappeared has the power to change reality through the creative machinations of an artist. The dark entity/Jagger is trying to force Alan to provide them with more agency and power through his writing. The novel Departure is the text that they have ordered. In this way, the game is ultimately about