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part, images of the haunted house reflect that. As long ago as 1961 R.W. Stallman referred to James and his ‘edifice complex’. Other critics have noted that this jocular reference to Freud suggests the house as an uncanny generator of secrets that shape James’s representation of traumatic childhood, as in The Turn of the Screw (1898). 1 The house is also closely related to the Jamesian house of
1 Ireland’s haunted houses To be human is to dwell, Heidegger (1977: 325) says, and to dwell means to live with others as family and as neighbours. The house is a universal symbol of humanity. All societies have their own household gods, and Irish household gods figure prominently in David Creedon’s Ghosts of the Faithful Departed,1 an award-winning collection of photographs of abandoned houses in the Irish countryside. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, a picture of Christ with the names of the family written underneath, representing the security, well-being and
earlier observations that ‘primitive races’ are seen to live on primitive rocks, to be shaped by them, to be like them, to belong to and even be part of them, by considering how rocks are in turn shaped by their past inhabitants, taking on their ghostly energies or even life. The emphasis here is on rocks – or more precisely on the walls of old haunted houses and prehistoric stones – that have survived
Popular television drama produced for a specifically female audience has been thought about and discussed in relation to a number of key dramatic genres within British television. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, popular, inexpensive outlets for the female Gothic narrative attracted the female reader. It was presumed that they avidly 'devoured' the serialised fictions of domestic terror, following the fates of a bevy of female victim-heroines. A number of female Gothic adaptations were broadcast on television in the UK. These included three BBC adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and adaptations of Peter Godfrey's The Two Mrs Carrolls and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (Hour of Mystery). Rebecca, as with the other female Gothic narratives, implicitly critiques the representation of the domestic space as ideal home, and in fact expresses an anxiety around the image of the perfected woman or wife.
The gothic has, for two hundred years, played an important role in female culture; and worked early on to feminise established literary forms and has, throughout its history, strongly challenged established notions of femininity. Neo-gothicism reflects the feminine dimensions of the ongoing cultural and literary change: gothic horror addresses 'gendered' problems of everyday life. This book focuses on the narrative and ideological components that shape gothic fictions as feminine forms. It explores the classic texts of two hundred years of gothicism on three levels. The first is their contextualising of the specific cultural-historical situation that they both come from and address. The second is their narrative texture, marked by a complex subjectivity; and third, the inter-textualisation of feminine gothic writing. Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women uses gothic contextualising to tell a gothic story of growing up, and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle parodically incorporates gothic texture. The gothicism of Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address relies very much on the Canadian landscape, and points to the intersection of neo-gothicism and Canadian culture. Lynne Tillman's Haunted Houses is a fictional braid of three gothic life stories of girls growing up in contemporary Brooklyn; the 'haunted houses' of the title are their bodies that are not born but becoming women. Dress, a classic feminine gothic sign for both propriety and property, is shown in the postmodern context as thematic enclosure of the body as well as formal enclosure of the story.
One of the dominant impressions given by the sculpture of Anish Kapoor is of haunting. In and around the definite presences, the manifest shining, brightly coloured forms, lie a series of baffling absences; the shades of presences that are in excess of the work, or the shadows of meanings not yet grasped. Perhaps this is most evident in the work that announces its haunting in its title, the spectral sculpture Ghost (1997), in which a sliver of light, caught dancing in the polished interior of a rugged block of Kilkenny limestone, becomes not only the `presence‘ that occupies the work but also a symbol of all that it is unable to embody and leaves hovering about its fringes and borders. This Ghost is Kapoor‘s haunted house sculpture; a sculpture in which the mysterious agency that unnerves the viewer is both the most significant occupant of its limestone mansion and, paradoxically, its most insignificant, or unsignifiable omission.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the term ‘uncomfortable houses’ was used to describe properties where restless spirits made life unpleasant for any living persons who tried to claim these supernatural residences as their own. This article uses the idea of ‘uncomfortable houses’ to examine how this ghostly discomfort related to larger cultural issues of economics and class in Victorian Britain. Authors such as Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant used the haunted house story as a means of social critique which commented on the financial problems facing many lower- and middle-class Victorians. Their stories focus on the moral development of the protagonists and reconciliation through the figure of the ghost, ultimately giving readers the happy endings that many male-authored ghost stories lack. Riddell‘s ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ and ‘Walnut-Tree House’ and Oliphant‘s ‘The Open Door’ serve as important examples of this ‘suburban Gothic’ literature.
This book explores the issue of a collective representation of Ireland after the sudden death of the 'Celtic Tiger' and introduces the aesthetic idea that runs throughout. The focus is on the idea articulated by W. B. Yeats in his famous poem 'The Second Coming'. The book also explores the symbolic order and imaginative structure, the meanings and values associated with house and home, the haunted houses of Ireland's 'ghost estates' and the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household. It examines the sophisticated financial instruments derived from mortgage-backed securities that were a lynchpin of global financialization and the epicentre of the crash, the question of the fiscal and moral foundations of the collective household of Europe. A story about fundamental values and principles of fairness and justice is discussed, in particular, the contemporary conflict that reiterates the ancient Irish mythic story of the Tain. The book suggests correspondences between Plato's Republic and the Irish republic in the deformations and devolution of democracy into tyranny. It traces a red thread from the predicament of the ancient Athenians to contemporary Ireland in terms of the need to govern pleonexia, appetites without limits. The political and economic policies and practices of Irish development, the designation of Ireland's 'tax free zones', are also discussed. Finally, the ideal type of person who has been emerging under the auspices of the neoliberal revolution is imagined.
Kasparov. Exterior to interior: haunted houses Jayanti’s documentary centres on the idea of a hero chess-player defeating the invading presence of mechanised thought. The film’s conception of idealised machines is suggested in the documentary’s opening scenes of slow-paced Americana, showing the predictable freight train passing by, and further emphasising Deep Blue’s outsider status, deserving of conquest by the hero. As Newsweek stated on its front page, the match was ‘The Brain’s Last Stand’ and Kasparov was, as the hero, its representative. The enemy was the machine
form. To convey the sense of claustrophobia that pervades the Convent, she describes it, sometimes seriously and on other occasions with a note of humorous parody, in terms of the classic Gothic castle or haunted house, while assigning to Nanda the conventional role of entrapped heroine. A key theme in Gothic narrative, works of female Gothic in particular as is illustrated by critical readings of the