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this period too. But these ghosts were largely used ironically, to lampoon or subvert authority. The consequence of the English revolution was, in the view of some conservative commentators, to produce a dangerous scepticism – not merely about spectres but also about religious faith and political sovereignty. Like the excesses of the Gothic, the ghosts of seventeenth
By exploring how laughter is represented in Kipling‘s ghost stories this article attempts a re-evaluation of how colonial and postcolonial identities can be theorised within the Gothic. Laughter, and the disorientation that it provokes, is accorded a Gothic function that destabilises images of colonial authority.
Smith explores how Stoker‘s novel raises some complex questions about love through its use of a male love-struck narrator, who appears to be caught in a Female Gothic plot which casts him as its hero. In the novel ‘love’ becomes increasingly sinister as it turns into a destabilising and dangerously irrational emotion that ultimately aligns love with feelings of justified horror. Jewel (1903, revised 1912) thus develops a male reading of a Female Gothic plot in which the idea of female empowerment becomes defined as horrific. However, this idea of a pathologised love, Smith argues, is not unique to Stoker and can be linked to Freud‘s account of love, which reveals how issues relating to male authority appear within psychoanalytical debates about emotion at the time.
In the early gothic literature of the eighteenth century danger lurked in the darkness beneath the pointed arches of gothic buildings. During the nineteenth century, there was a progressive, although never complete, dislocation of gothic literary readings from gothic architecture. This article explores a phase in that development through discussion of a series of dark illustrations produced by Hablot Knight Browne to illustrate novels by Charles Dickens. These show the way in which the rounded arches of neo-classical architecture were depicted in the mid-nineteenth century as locales of oppression and obscurity. Such depictions acted, in an age of political and moral reform, to critique the values of the system of power and authority that such architecture represented.
This paper investigates lower-class voices within the context of anti-Gothic criticism, using Ann Radcliffe’s novels and early Gothic critic Joseph Addison’s essays to highlight the ways in which Radcliffe reassigns value to the Gothic aesthetic. It further emphasizes Radcliffe’s reconfiguration of domestic roles as she positions patriarchal figures as anti-Gothic critics, the heroine as reader of gothic narratives, and lowerclass voices and tales as gothic texts. The Mysteries of Udolpho and Romance of the Forest subvert critical discourse and its motif of servants’ contagious irrationality. In Radcliffe’s novels, ‘vulgar’ narratives as superstitious discourse do not spread fear to susceptible heroines, embodiments of bourgeois virtue, but demonstrate the ways in which fear is a construct of patriarchal discourse. Servants and country people, in turn, construct a pedagogy for reading gothic texts that permit heroines to deconstruct metaphors of ghostly haunting embedded in their tales and resist patriarchal hegemony and interpretative authority over gothic texts.
the brain which lies beneath – an overview of a person's perceived individuality might thus be ascertained with a conceit of scientific authority during their lifetime rather than posthumously. Intellectual capability is but one attribute which the study of the surface of the skull ought, theoretically, to reveal, as The Times infers: [Gall] has found in the skulls of singing birds, in those of celebrated Musicians, and, above all, in that of Mozart, the organ of music. Finally, the wily brain of
worshipped for her protection of the home. 9 We find mummies awaken on English soil in The Jewel of Seven Stars , ‘Lot No. 249’, and Iras . Given, however, the playful self-awareness of writers such as Stoker, Conan Doyle and Douglas, one is invited to question whether these mummies have really come to life, or whether there is a mental exhaustion, delusion or intoxication on the part of the narrators or observers which makes the corpses seem animated; doubt is often cast on the perceived authority of the – usually
, intimidating the sinner by calling on the highest authorities to condemn, as in the real-life excommunication: ‘Devyne poware of michtis maist / Of father, sone, and halie gaist’. Only later when the crime is announced – a bathetic revelation of the theft of ‘fyve fat geis’ and other poultry (13–14) – does the tone become blackly comic. Even then, there is uncertainty: similar crimes were taken seriously and were the subjects of near-contemporary legislation. 45 The vivid list of distinctive and named devils later in the poem continues this ambivalence, rivalling the
was ‘but a naturall sicknes’. 17 Early modern Scots seem to have reasoned that ‘if you don’t see this every day’, or ‘if you can’t produce an everyday explanation for it’, then it was ‘not natural’ and thus probably supernatural. A similar process of reasoning operates today. The question may thus arise: who has authority to decide what is natural and what is supernatural? 18 Today, what is normal or natural is defined by science. There is nothing unscientific about the concept of large marine animals, and no basic scientific assumptions would be violated if a
comprehensible to modern readers by presenting them as de facto Europeans, a contrivance that inadvertently abetted contemporary prejudices against pagans and non-Europeans. Nevertheless, the Copland and ‘Mummius’ poems both take issue with Eurocentrism and the authority of scientists, for which respect had evidently begun to wane by 1834. 40 Over a decade later, Poe employed the same technological attributions and expressed the same scepticism about experts in his mummy tale. One more vociferous Egyptian in