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The John Rylands Library is an outstanding example of neo-Gothic architecture, and is without parallel in Britain as a memorial library. This article situates the Library‘s foundation at the close of the nineteenth century within the economic and cultural development of Manchester, the worlds first industrial city, and within wider trends in library history. Enriqueta Rylands‘s aims in establishing the Library are analysed, as well as her influence on the design and construction of the building. The article includes a detailed examination of the iconography of the building and the innovative use of building services technology designed to protect the remarkable collections that were amassed by Mrs Rylands. Later developments are also treated, including the most recent ‘Unlocking the Rylands’ project, 2000-07.
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.
Gothic as a genre has become more amorphous and difficult to contain. This book brings together for the first time many of the multifarious visual motifs and media associated with Gothic together with areas that have never received serious study or mention in this regard before. It draws attention to an array of dark artefacts such as Goth and Gothic jewellery, dolls, posters and food, which, though part of popular mass marketing, have often been marginalised and largely omitted from the mainstream of Gothic Studies publishing. The book moves from the earliest Gothic architecture to décor and visual aspects of theatrical design, masquerade and dance. It focuses on paintings in two historical spans from Jan Van Eyck to Henry Fuseli and from Goya to H. R. Giger to consider Clovis Trouille's works influenced by horror films and Vincent Castiglia's paintings in blood. Gothic engravings, motifs of spectral portraits, posters and signs are covered. The book then uses early visual devices like Eidophusikon and the long-lived entertainment of peepshows to introduce a discussion of projection technologies like magic lanterns and, subsequently, film and TV. Gothic photography from Daguerreotypes onwards; and Gothic font, scripts and calligraphy are then discussed. Finally, the book presents a survey of the development of newer Gothic media, such as video gaming, virtual reality (VR) games and survival horror apps.
floor from the scene’s glorious tenebrous birth. The book also goes further back, starting with the fall of Rome which was sacked by the original Goths. Then it threads its way through shadowy folk tales, ghost stories, Gothic architecture and the literature of ‘turn the centuries turn’ and finally settles down, deep in the dark heart of the forest of pop culture, with the first band to be called gothic, The Doors. It then cavorts like Pan and his wild eyed followers to the life-changing adventures of glam and
1.1 Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture It is possible to argue that the pointed arch and pointed rib vault (consisting of arches supporting an enclosed space within a barrel structure or tunnel) comprise the foundational epitome of Gothic architectural style. These shapes, together with spires, crenellations, soaring buttresses, piers with
painter of the late fifteenth century, with much later Gothic architecture and art. Though one of course keeps specific and distinct historical contexts in mind, it is notable that critics and writers, in identifying traces of Bosch’s influence in Lovecraft’s monsters, are increasingly arranging and re-assigning such cultural artefacts due to properties perceived to be held in common. In writing of Gothic
The body is a potential marker of monstrosity, identifying those who do not fit into the body politic. Irregularity and the grotesque have been associated with Gothic architecture and are also indicative of wayward flesh and its deformities. Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. Original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts include The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies will be traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. Dangerous Bodies demonstrates how the Gothic corpus is haunted by a tangible sense of corporeality, often at its most visceral. Chapters set out to vocalise specific body parts such as skin, genitals, the nose and eyes, as well as blood. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.
sublime in landscape; changing conceptions of the passions, particularly the question of representing the psychology of villainy; the ideological meanings of Gothic architecture. All of these are touched on here, but could be illustrated far more extensively. However, part of our justification would be that sensibility, the natural sublime and the ‘Gothic revival’ in architecture are already the subject of many substantial
Malkin's account of his Gothicism, at which time he recasts the scene as the very moment that Gothic architecture comes to England. When Blake revisits his engraving of Joseph, he inscribes the following under it: JOSEPH of Arimathea among The Rocks of Albion Engraved by W Blake 1773 from an old Italian Drawing This is One of the Gothic Artists who built the
William Blake, ‘Albions Angel rose …’, Europe a Prophecy , copy A, plate 12 (Bentley 14) (1794 [1795]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Blake's oeuvre teems with Gothic iconography. The twisted, ominous trees of Songs of Innocence recall the theory developed by James Hall in Essay on the Origin and Principles of Gothic Architecture (1797