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This book explores the diverse literary, film and visionary creations of the polymathic and influential British artist Clive Barker. It presents groundbreaking essays that critically reevaluate Barker's oeuvre. These include in-depth analyses of his celebrated and lesser known novels, short stories, theme park designs, screen and comic book adaptations, film direction and production, sketches and book illustrations, as well as responses to his material from critics and fan communities. The book examines Barker's earlier fiction and its place within British horror fiction and socio-cultural contexts. Selected tales from the Books of Blood are exemplary in their response to the frustrations and political radicalism of the 1980s British cultural anxieties. Aiming to rally those who stand defiant of Thatcher's polarising vision of neoliberal British conservatism, Weaveworld is revealed to be a savage indictment of 1980s British politics. The book explores Barker's transition from author to filmmaker, and how his vision was translated, captured, and occasionally compromised in its adaptation from page to the screen. Barker's work contains features which can be potentially read as feminine and queer, positioning them within traditions of the Gothic, the melodrama and the fantastic. The book examines Barker's works, especially Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions, through the critical lenses of queer culture, desire, and brand recognition. It considers Barker's complex and multi-layered marks in the field, exploring and re-evaluating his works, focusing on Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone's new myths of the flesh'.
, his fascination with the body is something that still pervades his work and which he has never repudiated. 2 In the later fiction, particularly the novella Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium , which accompanied a series of six action figures distributed by McFarlane in 2001, and in his widely publicised return to horror with Mister B. Gone ( 2007 ), this has
The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–2017) and The Alienist (2018–) belong to an expanding group of stylish nineteenth-century-set gothic mystery/crime dramas that variously combine history, fiction, and fantasy. They share common themes connected to class, social change, morality, morality, and gender, especially masculine crisis, but also a particular fascination with the body and the mind. Both are characterised by graphic scenes of violence, death, and disturbingly vivid depictions of human cadavers, alongside exploration and interrogation of troubled minds and tortured souls. Significantly, they are set against a backdrop of social reform and changing attitudes towards scientific progress and innovations in medical practice, The Frankenstein Chronicles during the first half of the century, and The Alienist during its final years. But progress and the pre-eminence of science are frequently problematised as those in pursuit of radical advancement are often morally ambiguous and prone to corruption. This chapter explores the resulting tensions between science, faith, politicians, and agents of the law. Furthermore, it engages with the series’ preoccupation with the nature of monstrosity and morbid spectacles of human vulnerability. It will argue that the body and mind are pivotal in the struggle between competing forces and that both are consistently contested and conflicted.
in a more realist mode. Analysing Barker's more recent fiction through Douglas Winter's framework of ‘anti-horror’, Xavier Aldana Reyes contends in his chapter, ‘Clive Barker's late (anti-)horror fiction: Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone 's new myths of the flesh’, that Barker's central preoccupation remains focused on the body as the site for transformation and transcendence in
The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute’s erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man’s lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. The subject topics covered are wide-ranging: the art history of homoeroticism; casual sex before hooking-up; transgender; New York queer sex; masturbation; pornography; sex in the city. The duality indicated by the book’s title reflects its themes. It is an experiment in writing an American sexual history that refuses the confines of identity sexuality studies, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly ‘normal’. What unites this project is a fascination with sex at the margins, refusing the classificatory frameworks of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and demonstrating gender and sexual indecision and flexibility. And the book is also an exploration of the role of the archive in such histories. The sex discussed is located both in the margins of the archives, what has been termed the counterarchive, but also, importantly, in the pockets of recorded desire located in the most traditional and respectable repositories. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow’s archive. The market is potentially extensive: those interested in American studies, sexuality studies, contemporary history, the history of sex, psychology, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer studies, trans studies, pornography studies, visual studies, museum studies, and media studies.
. (III.vii.69–73) For Hieronimo, then, the torments that have led his ‘tortured soul’ to ‘the brazen gates of hell’ (while his ‘broken sighs’, ‘hovering in the air’, ‘Soliciting for justice and revenge’, have helplessly ‘Beat at the windows of the brightest heavens’ like butterflies flailing their wings against glass) appear to have
horrific spectacle. This approach has also been evident in new projects focused on creating Barker-branded franchises, and opportunities to tie together epic book series in fresh ways. One example of this process has been the Tortured Souls series, a planned franchise taking in a toy line developed with Todd McFarlane, short stories, and a long in-development feature film. More
Péguy’s priest incarnates a would-be alternative. The priest, played by Édouard Delmont, has to contend with aggressively atheistic hostility, most cogently articulated by the local barkeeper Père Didier who favours political revolution. He nevertheless builds a church single-handed (!) and manages to win over the village by his example. The film’s religioso kitsch reaches its apogee when the priest talks the ‘tortured soul’ Père Didier (une grande âme torturée) out of his cynicism on his deathbed, to the accompaniment of an angelic choir. When the Cardinal comes to
priest of T. P. McKenna. ‘I liked you better before you started thinking’, Eugene moans. Susan D’Arcy’s obituary of the actor stated that his forte was ‘tortured souls, menopausal identity crises’ ( 1977 : 258), which is achieved with finely observed nuance in Girl with Green Eyes . Eugene is separated from his wife but still loves her, he is a father, and he ultimately cannot face Kate maturing from the image he held of her. She demands commitment from a man who would prefer to hide behind polished aphorisms and at the end of the picture she has moved to London. We
quality of their skin and reveal their carefully concealed difference to humans. The sparkly vampire has come to be regarded as representative of a ‘de-fanged’ vampire, a vampire more likely to be regarded as a desirable romantic partner than a bloodthirsty killer. These vampires have supernatural abilities and tortured souls but avoid drinking human blood, instead sating themselves on wild animals, as in