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’s novel. Perhaps Steffen Hantke had this in mind when he observed that a special relationship seems to exist between Shelley’s Frankenstein and modern writers of neo-Victorian fiction (250). While some of the most famous neo-Victorian texts (works like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine , Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age , or Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ) make no reference to Shelley’s Creature, many other pieces bear out Hantke’s observation, including the two texts on which this chapter will
of realism, fantasy and comedy. Television has long been regarded as a medium that has a special relationship with its viewers’ everyday lives. In a sense, the scholarly study of television – in particular what we could call the aesthetic study of television drama – is a process of ‘making strange’ the most familiar of media, of attaining some kind of critical distance from that which is quotidian and taken for granted. Yet it is television’s very familiarity, and its conventional focus upon the familiar, the present time and the everyday, that opens up
), while the crypt keeper is obviously a denizen of Hell, albeit of unspecified rank. From Beyond the Grave is not quite as explicit as this, but even here we are led to believe that the shopkeeper is not entirely human. (For one thing, he seems unaffected by being shot point blank.) This horror host also has a special relationship with the camera and the audience, showing an awareness of both that is not available to the films’ ‘normal’ characters. At the end of Torture Garden , Tales from the
-like, while the ‘people themselves are like their land’. It is not just that the granite land and the Celts are imagined to have some kind of close, special relationship, but that they are like each other and could even be part of each other. Accounts such as Val Baker’s regarding the essential sameness of the land and the Celts are a way of claiming that these people belong, that the land
that witches arrived at Sabbats riding werewolves. Clearly in the mind of the Church – or, at least, in the minds of the writers of Inquisition handbooks – women enjoyed a special relationship with nature and the animal world, which explained their greater propensity for wicked and lustful behaviour. Because she was formed from a ‘bent rib’ she is an ‘imperfect animal’. 9 ‘You do not know that woman
awareness on whatever level of its special relationship with earlier cinematic practices. In X – The Unknown the advent of the ‘monster’ is announced by a bizarre geiger counter reading. As a soldier remarks, ‘We’re getting a reading on the counter where there shouldn’t be one.’ While there is no obvious cinematic parallel here, once again a device which symbolises a perceptual certitude is shown as being inadequate. It is instructive at this point to see what were the most popular British films at
, in the section of The Arcades Project on Grandville, is interested in the strange vitality material objects came to acquire in the nineteenth century, and the image of the sorcerer evokes a special relationship with objects that spoke to what fascinated Benjamin about Grandville: his uncanny art form awakens objects out of their inert materiality, uncovers the thing
stylistic debt to David Lynch’s films. 13 However, in contrast to Lynch’s depiction of violent abnormality fermenting beneath mundanity, Campion as writer-director offers an examination of oblique jealousies made manifest, private convictions grown to public embarrassments, and unremarkable family pressures exaggerated to a fatal conclusion: [Sweetie] is still ‘Dad’s real girl’ and his ‘princess’ but he is as lost as she is in self-delusion and denial. Kay has to face her exclusion from their ‘special