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Contemporary critics themselves were clear about Christabel Gothic provenance. George Felton Mathew, in the European Magazine, sketches in the Gothic aesthetic as a positive backdrop against which he feels the poem ought to be read, particularly focusing on Christabel’s idealized, Gothic charm: ‘she is charitable, religious, beautiful and tender’ (Reiman 1977 : 505). He also poses the crucial question of
to justice. Here too, the possibility remains that they are little more than external manifestations of Roderic’s own psychic state. Through a direct appropriation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth , ghost-seeing in Young’s Donalda is the phantasmatic projection of a conscience that is riddled with guilt. If this coupling of the ‘Gothic’ aesthetic with
employing the Gothic aesthetic in his narratives, Blackwood prefers instead to implement it in the light of his own interpretation of spiritual and ecological ontologies. Blackwood's nuanced presentation of the Gothic aesthetic cultivates an ecoGothic parterre within which Blackwood's physical landscapes evoke dread through a mystical conflation of gardens and the otherworldly. Blackwoodian mystical landscapes When he observed the natural landscape, Blackwood viewed it beyond its mere exterior characteristics. He recognised the
Gothic aesthetic to which their stylistic innovations only contributed. 6 This particular thread of the Gothic Revival in England was also inextricably tied to the political ferment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The medieval parishioner's ‘animated devotion at the rude Gothic shrine’ effectively idealised a moment in time before the advent of the enlightenment political discourse that would culminate
Gothic aesthetic). Critics have tended to isolate specific texts or clusters of texts rather than explore Gothic patterns across Carter’s oeuvre. Linden Peach, for example, argues that Carter’s early work is influenced by a ‘Euro-American Gothic’ tradition and is particularly indebted to some of the key features of American Gothic outlined by Leslie Fiedler in his seminal study Love and Death in the
transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. (Foucault 1979 : 100-1) As we shall see, a pattern of reinforcement and undermining is particularly relevant to Gothic rewriting, and to the Gothic aesthetic (the subject of the following
spiritual or ghostly ethereality and grave-oriented, earthy embodiment. The Gothic aesthetic of Michael Jackson’s Ghosts does much the same thing. Throughout the corps de ballet Michael does to death (as it were) heavy foot-stomping, pounding upon the floor, and foot-dragging. More than any other Jackson choreography I know, this one holds its bodies in continual flex at the waist to emphasise
the perception of properties. It is only a subsequent abstraction and systematisation that creates a conventional or Kantian sublime that divides subject from object, line from the delineated. A Gothic aesthetic is neither one in which a formless world requires order nor one in which the world is simply given as bounded and ordered: we are neither in the world of experience – where one regards what is other than oneself with utter terror
that is too vast to assimilate readily, even for them as women. 8 It is not that Blake, by refusing to represent their success, remains patriarchal in spirit, but that his vision of the feminine, by placing his characters within a subterranean or cavernous darkness, is reproducing the Gothic aesthetics that he knew so well in order to re-signify feminine bondage as a mental one – at least partially so. The Gothic aesthetic stands for a set of values that is
chapter I want to trace the development of this ‘cohering’ in Radcliffe’s early texts, showing how these techniques have their origins in the discursive practices of the Gothic aesthetic, thus supplementing what I take to be the most powerful modern re-readings of Radcliffe. The core of Radcliffean complexity, I believe, is the issue of authority, the manner in which the later Radcliffe succeeds in