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This is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day; it considers a number of authors rather than a single author from this period. This study discusses the impact of this change in attitudes on literature and literary adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. This collection will enhance the growing academic interest in trauma narratives and taboo-literature, offering a useful contribution to a fast-evolving field of artistic criticism which is concerned with the relationship between social issues and creativity. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.
‘The conveyance of thought’ in the wonderful century of science In this chapter, I critically reflect on the interface between literature and science in the long nineteenth century. I map trends in the field suggesting that, methodologically, literature and science paradigms are quite fundamental to the understanding of interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies: in so far as the literature-science field has been characteristically concerned with the transmission of thought and its conveyance by
‘Russian Gothic’ as a term has only recently begun to enjoy any real currency in critical studies of Russian literature. The word ‘Gothic’ is commonly used in connection with, for instance, certain early works by Dostoevsky or, to a lesser extent, his later and more famous novels, which may be recognized as including Gothic elements or traces. Otherwise, what might have
This article engages with the discourse of food and eating especially as related to the representation of the abject eating-disordered body. I will be particularly interested in the gothic representation of the anorexic and bulimic body in samples of medical advice literature and NHS websites and how they reinforce popular myths about anorexia by imagining the eating disordered body as a fixed object of abjection. Focusing on the use of gothic devices, tropes and narrative structure, these imaginations will be read against alternative representations of anorexic/bulimic bodies in autobiographical illness narratives, fictional accounts and a psychoanalytical case history in order to explore how gothic discourses can help opening up new understandings and conceptions of illness, healing and corporeality in the dialogue between medical staff and patients.
The Gothic has become a popular genre in children’s and young adult literature published in the past decade. Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ series (2005–08) is the most visible and bestselling example of fiction for young people concerned with the boundaries between the living and the dead. However, there is a large and growing body of
The European Gothic novel was an enormous influence on nineteenth-century Russian fiction, as shown by the works of Pushkin, Dostoievskii and many other major novelists. However, both Russian and Western critics have ignored the survival of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs in Russian literature of the Soviet period, not only in fiction by dissident writers but also within the officially promoted genre of Socialist Realism. The Gothic-fantastic mode continued to function as a resource for satire, speculation, and ideological re-evaluation throughout the Soviet period and up to the present day. This article identifies and analyses three Gothic texts selected from mainstream Soviet literature between 1920 and 1940 and discusses their interaction with ideological trends.
In his analysis of the evolution of sexuality in society in Making Sexual History, Jeffrey Weeks comments that, following a series of major challenges throughout the twentieth century (ranging from Freud‘s work to the challenges of feminism and queer politics), ‘sexuality becomes a source of meaning, of social and political placing, and of individual sense of self ’. This special issue of Gothic Studies intends to foster further research on the topic of queer sexuality. This is research which has already been underway for some time but it has not always been interdisciplinary in nature, as is the case for these five articles, in their discussion of theatre, cinema, and literature or literary conventions borrowed from Gothic novels.
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 article analyses two recent American rewritings of the Leviathan myth: Dan Simmons‘s The Terror (2007) and Tim Curran‘s Leviathan (2013). Belonging to a tradition that has fruitfully elaborated the sea monster paradigm, both novels respond to current concerns about the spiritual and ethical decline of Western culture, the perils of anarchy, the monetarization of relations, and the impending ecological disasters. Besides exploring the biblical and Hobbesian intertextuality of the two novels, the article investigates various meanings coalescing into the scary creatures represented by Simmons and Curran. Two other objects of scrutiny are the increasing spectacularization of horror in todays literature and the potentiality of nautical Gothic, a form of writing that connotes the sea as a perturbing generator of psychoontological distress.
This study maps the influence of the Gothic mode in the Czech postmodern prose, especially in the novels published at the turn of the millennium: it primarily concerns books by Václav Vokolek, Miloš Urban and Jan Jandourek. Through analyticalinterpretative probes into these texts are demonstrated the main possibilities of the Gothic mode and consequences of its implementation in the contemporary Czech literature: distortion of the perspective and blurring of the individual identity, instability of the setting, expression of civilizational and existential fears. The study illustrates capturing of the key Gothic themes in the analyzed works of fiction and also the specific transformation and modification of these topics within individual author poetics. Special attention is particularly given to specifics of the setting, often combining typical Gothic topoi, which may be part of seriously intended opposition of the sacral and the profane, or they can also be presented as exposed cliché sceneries.