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Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein reflects both Romantic critiques of autonomy, as they have been recently defined by Nancy Yousef, and discourses of isolation and addiction as they appear in key texts by Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb. For Coleridge and Lamb, addiction leads to what current specialists often call ‘terminal uniqueness’, a feeling of isolation both incommunicable to others and incapable of being heard by a non-addicted audience. In its own portrayals of isolation, Frankenstein may be seen to intersect with these larger discourses of isolation, chemical dependence, and what Anya Taylor calls ‘the empty self ’ of Romantic addiction.
Though pointedly raising its literary pedigree with allusions to ‘high’ literature from Percy‘s RELIQUES to Spensers FAIRIE QUEENE, Coleridge‘s ‘Christabel’ (1799-1801) still draws heavily on the very Gothic fiction of the 1790s that he condemns as ‘low’ writing in reviews of the same period. Especially Gothic is this poems alter-ego relationship between the title character and the vampiric Geraldine. This peculiar use of echoes extends the many jibes of this period that blame the many literary changes of this time (including a mass-produced effulgence of printed writing and a frightening blurring of genres) on the Gothic as a kind of scapegoat for the cultural upheaval of this era. The Gothic is, in fact, a site for what Kristeva calls ‘abjection’: the cultural ‘throwing off’ of intermingled contradictions,into a symbolic realm that seems blatantly fictional and remote. As such a site, the Gothic in ‘Christabel’ haunts the poem with unresolved cultural quandaries that finally contribute to its unfinished, fragmentary nature. One such quandary is what is abjected in the Gothic relationship of the heroine and Geraldine: the irresolution at the time about the nature and potentials of woman.
This article considers a unified polar Gothic as a way of examining texts set in Arctic and Antarctic space. Through analysis of Coleridge‘s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelleys Frankenstein, and Poe‘s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , the author creates a framework for understanding polar Gothic, which includes liminal space, the supernatural, the Gothic sublime, ghosts and apparitions, and imperial Gothic anxieties about the degradation of civilisation. Analysing Verne‘s scientific-adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) with this framework, the author contextualises the continued public interest in the lost Franklin expedition and reflects on nineteenth-century polar Gothic anxieties in the present day. Polar space creates an uncanny potential for seeing ones own self and examining what lies beneath the surface of ones own rational mind.
(1800) and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), contain paradigmatic passages in which the poets anathematize the flood of dramatic translations that they believed jeopardized the nation’s moral and intellectual health (Wordsworth 1974 : i, 128-130; Coleridge 1983 : ii, 184-185). But the Romantics also developed a different, more diplomatic and ultimately more powerful method for countering the
Figure 4 Charles Lloyd, by John Constable (early 1800s) De Quincey had his share of problems, but consoled himself with the reflection that ‘by comparison with the lot of Charles L, I acknowledge my own to have been happy and serene’. 4 In the mid-1790s Lloyd was still hopeful about the future, and generously supported by his wealthy father. Having decided to pursue his poetic vocation, Lloyd approached the young Coleridge – just a few years his senior, yet already
funding for the project came from one person. 5 The next example shows the difficulties in creating a coherent glazing scheme when the funding came from a variety of sources. A complicated restoration: St Mary the Virgin, Ottery St Mary The restoration of St Mary’s Church at Ottery St Mary presented a series of difficulties to its coordinator, John Duke Coleridge. Coleridge was a lawyer but was more
contention of this chapter that, by explicitly associating key aspects of the narrative with Coleridge’s visionary poetry, the novel participates in a strategic late Victorian revival of Romanticism. I propose that repetition and reduplication – structural devices which are integral to the organisation, movement, and symbolic and thematic matter of Aylwin – are also part of the novel’s larger purpose to communicate its transmission and reproduction of a visionary Romanticism which is itself founded on repetition. Some preliminary words of