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environmental activism, particularly as manifest in the contemporary social movement against man-made climate change, can be conceived as a Gothic politics invoking the malevolent spectre of a cataclysmic eco-apocalypse, which can only be averted through drastic societal transformation and the development of a new ecological sensibility. The sublime threat posed by a significant rise in
An interview with China Miéville about the aesthetics and politics of Gothic, fantasy and weird fiction.
The literary formulation of Parnell's last year is a construct in which romantic notions of the demonic figure if not prominently then at least powerfully. Parnell died in 1891 and the great concentration of W. B. Yeats's writing about Parnell dates from the 1930s. The young Yeats discounted eighteenth-century writing, and his rediscovery of its value for him broadly coincides with the final emergence of Parnell the persona from a silent chrysalis. In The Literary Fantastic, Neil Cornwell has adapted the approach of Tzvetan Todorov to redefine what gothic literature was and how it worked. Preferring terms like 'the pure fantastic' to ambiguous ones such as 'the gothic', Cornwell locates the fantastic on 'a frontier between two adjacent realms'. Yeats's gothic, as evidenced in his demonic transformation of Parnell, is implicated in his sense of international politics from the First World War onwards.
While the importance of space in Gothic literature and the role of spectacle in the staging of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Gothic drama have received much attention, little has been written about how Gothic dramatic writing gestures with space. By looking at how dramatic writers rhetorically used Gothics politically and psychologically charged spaces in their dramatic works for stage and page, this essay explores how space functions in pre-realist drama. The essay shows how a rhetoric of space functions in three examples of Gothic theatrical writing - Matthew Lewis‘s The Castle Spectre, Catherine Gore‘s The Bond, and Jane Scott‘sThe Old Oak Chest - and suggests that British Gothic dramas spatial rhetoric anticipates cinematic uses of space.
This book explores a number of Alan Moore's works in various forms, including comics, performance, short prose and the novel, and presents a scholarly study of these texts. It offers additional readings to argue for a politically charged sense of Moore's position within the Gothic tradition, investigates surreal Englishness in The Bojeffries Saga, and discusses the doppelganger in Swamp Thing and From Hell. Radical environmental activism can be conceived as a Gothic politics invoking the malevolent spectre of a cataclysmic eco-apocalypse. The book presents Christian W. Schneider's treatment of the apocalyptic in Watchmen and a reassessment of the significance of liminality from the Gothic tradition in V for Vendetta. It explores the relationship between Moore's work and broader textual traditions, placing particular emphasis on the political and cultural significance of intertextual relationships and adaptations. A historically sensitive reading of From Hell connects Moore's concern with the urban environment to his engagement with a range of historical discourses. The book elucidates Moore's treatment of the superhero in relation to key Gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto and presents an analysis of the nexus of group politics and survival in Watchmen. The book also engages in Moore's theories of art, magic, resurrections, and spirits in its discourse A Small Killing, A Disease of Language, and the Voice of the Fire. It also explores the insight that his adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, which are laced with heterocosms and bricolage, can yield for broader understandings of his forays into the occult.
It is a central thesis that nineteenth-century Ireland went through a series of traumatic processes of modernization, which have been denied and repressed in their aftermath. The mediated presence of Sheridan Le Fanu and Honore de Balzac in the work of W.B. Yeats brings to a head political questions of the utmost gravity, the most notable being Yeats's engagement with fascism. Le Fanu has been persistently aligned with a so-called Irish gothic tradition. The objective in this book is to observe the historical forces inscribed in Le Fanu's distinctive non-affiliation to this doubtful tradition. The book presents a French response to Charles Maturin's gothic work, Melmoth the Wanderer, which is followed by discussion of a triangular pattern linking Balzac, Le Fanu and Yeats. This is followed by an attempt to pay concentrate attention within the texts of Le Fanu's novels and tales, with only a due regard for the historical setting of Le Fanu's The House by the Churchyard. An admirer of Le Fanu's fiction, Elizabeth Bowen adopted some of the stock-in-trade of the ghost story to investigate altered experiences of reality under the blitz. A detailed examination of her The Heat of the Day serves to reopen questions of fixity of character, national identity and historical reflexivity. In this work, the empty seat maintained for the long dead Guy might be decoded as a suitably feeble attempt to repatriate Le Fanu's Guy Deverell from an English to an Irish 1950s setting.
demonic ‘hero’ of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus remarks wittily before his very terrible end, ‘The time we last, a little shorter, a little longer, we call immortality.’ 16 One has some responsibility to the broader context of Yeats’s authoritarianism, and Mann had witnessed the devillish consequences of gothic politics. The comparative approach illuminates much that admirers of the poet wish to have
example of painterly stained glass closely aligned with eighteenth-century gothic: the Magna Carta episode was a favourite of those inspired by gothic political history, and depictions of it seem to have made quite regular appearances in eighteenth-century gothic interiors. 14 So painterly glass was not completely rejected by eighteenth-century gothic, but its appeal was not widespread. Even if painterly stained glass had appealed to more gothic
experience and language: the space of the female subject. Notes 1 Gothicists as well as feminist critics have discussed gothic politics (e.g. Punter 1980 ; Radway 1984 ), its origins in terms of production (Mohr 1990 ) and its reception (Tompkins 1980 ). See also Felski’s general ‘re-contextualising women
Arimathea , it transforms the stasis of both biblical history and Enlightenment historiography into the Living Form of the Gothic. The Gothic's Living Form ruptures both biblical history and historical probability, transforming Joseph of Arimathea through its linking of heterogeneous and temporally disparate elements. In his chapter in this volume, Kiel Shaub is doubtlessly right to caution against finding Blake's Gothic politics in this image