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In this essay I argue that Frankenstein‘s monster, as a being constructed, in part, from nonhuman animal remains obtained from slaughterhouses, is literally a bizarre by-product of meat-eating. Frankensteins monster is a ‘monster’ because he is meat that was not consumed and brought back to life. What was intended for the human table comes to life and threatens the social order. The fact that the monster is a vegetarian thus becomes essential for an understanding of Shelley‘s novel. The Gothic narrative of Frankenstein is not one of a supernatural nature; rather the Gothic narrative within the text is the one that confronts the seemingly natural system of carnivorism.
This article elucidates an aspect of the formal use Gothic fiction makes of space. It begins by exploring the complex and confusing area in between spaces; after discussing examples of spatial ambiguity from several genres, and briefly outlining some narrative ‘geometries’ employed by Gothic fiction, the article concentrates on a segment from Ann Radcliffe‘s The Italian in order to show how precisely the use of thresholds can elicit numinous terror, and so, in what way the threshold is vital to the construction of Gothic narratives. The discussion of Gothic spaces is rounded off with a close analogy from the field of contemporary mathematics which clarifies Gothic liminalization techniques.
This essay positions the drug-using doctor at the intersection between traditional Gothic horror and a new fin-de-siècle medical realism, embedding the cultural anxieties at the fin de siècle in relation to the ethical and theological boundaries of scientific knowledge. The objective is to provide a framework for reading and interpreting the medico-gothic narrative of addiction. The essay examines the writings of three pioneering physician-scientists: one historical – Sigmund Freud – and two fictional – Dr Jekyll, in Robert Louis Stevenson‘s Strange Case of DrJekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Dr Seward in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897).
This article examines the effects of distracted sight, peripheral objects and hazily-perceived images in the ghost stories of M. R. James. It argues that the uncanny illumination produced by the accidental glance in his tales bears affinity with many Gothic narratives, including those of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Margaret Oliphant. James‘s work has often solicited only a casual look from critics, yet his exploration of the haunted edge of vision not only grants his work a hitherto neglected complexity, but also places him firmly within the Gothic tradition.
Haslam reads The Bondwoman‘s Narrative through the lens of the gothic literary tradition, as framed by Jerrold Hogle, and its relations to slave narratives, as discussed by Teresa Goddu. Specifically, the novel uses the gothic, in part, as slave narratives traditionally do: to depict the brutality and horror of the violence of slavery. But Crafts transforms this use of the gothic into a direct attack on the slave owners themselves. Crafts situates the generalities of the gothic tradition within American slavery, writing a gothic narrative that - to transform Hogle‘s analysis - exposes the ‘brutal concreteness’ of slavery while depicting the ‘pervasively counterfeit existence’ of white superiority.
Smith argues that the medical memoirs of Sir Frederick Treves can be read as a Gothic narrative. Treves failure to account for Joseph Merrick (aka ‘The Elephant Man’) in scientific terms is supplanted by an attempt to plot Merrick in relation to literary forms, such as the Gothic. Additionally, Treves uses the Gothic in order to suggest the fears of incarceration and threatened male violence felt by an apparently neurotic woman. It therefore becomes possible to read Treves‘ memoirs as a document which reveals both the particular flavour of the Gothic discourse at the end of the nineteenth century and as a critique of medical practice.
This volume explores how current ideas about ecocriticism can be applied to Gothic narratives in order to help draw out their often dystopian ecological visions. The book argues that, from chilling Victorian panoramas to films such as Frankenstein or The Thing, the Arctic looms large as a blank screen on which fantasies of Gothic entrapment may be projected. It explores selected tales of Algernon Blackwood showing some ways in which Blackwood blurs the distinctions between the human world and a wider natural and spiritual ecology. The book examines the seventeenth-century New England Puritan influence on later Gothic representations of the natural world in North America. It provides an overview of recent studies on the American Gothic which highlight the notion of the wilderness as an ideological lens through which early settlers viewed the strange landscape they found themselves in. The book argues that, from its origins, women's Gothic fiction has undermined fictions of the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the unnatural by creating worlds in which the everyday is collapsed with the nightmarish. The book is the first to explore the Gothic through theories of ecocriticism. The structure of the volume broadly follows national trends, beginning with a British tradition, and moving through a Canadian context. It also follows through a specifically American model of the ecoGothic, before concluding with Deckard's discussion of a possible global context which could overcome national variations.
Gothic productions appear in clusters during the capitalist world-markets transition from one economic cycle to another. Using a world-systems approach, I argue that Gothic narrative devices and sensations are both historically specific to the time of their production and representative of the general logic of capitalist time-space contortions. A world-systems perspective insists on an inter-state relational approach relatively unexplored within Gothic studies. Using Stoker‘s Dracula as a case study, the article claims that Dracula encodes inter-imperialist tensions, primarily those between England and Germany and their proxy agents over South African gold mines in the Transvaal. This antagonism provides the background to the Boer War, itself a forerunner to the First World War‘s battle among imperialists.
Money, not merely as subject in literature but also in its very form and function, exhibits qualities of spectral evanescence, fetishised power over the imagination, and the uncontrollable transgression of boundaries and limits, which closely parallel the concerns and anxieties of Gothic literature. Yet it is in the writings of economic theorists and commentators on market society like Adam Smith and Karl Marx that these Gothic anxieties about money are most clearly articulated. Stevensons short story ‘The Isle of Voices’, read in the context of his comments on money in his other writings, is one of the few fictional texts which uses these properties of money to create what might be called a ‘financial Gothic’ narrative, which nevertheless has insights and implications for the narratives of capitalist modernity in general.
The article seeks to explore questions of fictional female victimhood by examining feminist and post-feminist critical engagements with the Gothic heroine figure. The paper traces instances of this figure in literary and filmic versions of the ‘female gothic’ narrative, focusing in particular on the female gothic film cycle of the 1940s, in films such as Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), and the cycles recurrence in more contemporary female-addressed suspense thrillers, such as Deceived (1991), Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), Shadow of Doubt (1998), and What Lies Beneath (2000). The paper reveals that the neo-gothic heroine condenses key issues pertinent to shifts in feminist and post-feminist critique, such as woman-as-victim, negotiations about the meanings of femininity, and the relationship between women and domestic space.