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This essay reads the opening of Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time against its high-modernist reception history to recover its Gothic unconscious. My argument first traces the repressed horror tale at the heart of ‘Combray I’ by foregrounding tropes of fear and imprisonment; I then recontextualize Proust within the Gothic tradition, drawing explicit comparisons to Poe and Radcliffe. I suggest that the narrators invocation and subsequent repression of Gothic forces, in particular of the uncanny, constitutes the novels primal dialectic and plays a constitutive role in the dramas of memory and desire.
The last decade has seen a diffusion of the Gothic across a wide range of cultural sites, a relative explosion of Gothic images and narratives prompting a renewed critical interest in the genre. However, very little sustained attention has been paid to what we might term 'Gothic television' until this point. This book fills this gap by offering an analysis of where and how the genre might be located on British and US television, from the start of television broadcasting to the present day. In this analysis, Gothic television is understood as a domestic form of a genre which is deeply concerned with the domestic, writing stories of unspeakable family secrets and homely trauma large across the television screen. The book begins with a discussion on two divergent strands of Gothic television that developed in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s, charting the emergence of the restrained, suggestive ghost story and the effects-laden, supernatural horror tale. It then focuses on the adaptation of what has been termed 'female Gothic' or 'women's Gothic' novels. The book moves on to discuss two hybrid forms of Gothic drama in the 1960s, the Gothic family sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family, and the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. Finally, it looks at some recent examples of Gothic television in the United States, starting with a discussion of the long-form serial drama, Twin Peaks, as the initiator of a trend for dark, uncanny drama on North American television.
imagination. The second part will focus on Ambrose Bierce, whose Gothic horror tales offer an insight into the American imagination and the environment. A strand of ecocritical thought runs throughout, with the goal of stimulating a dialogue with the Gothic and situating a nostalgic yet fearful response to the wilderness frontier at the heart of American Gothic. Wilderness has long been identified as a key
This chapter explores the work of women poststructuralist writers with a new reading of Julia Kristeva. It presents a close reading of her oeuvre which will display how she has taken the gendered distinctions between the realms of literature and theology and reshaped them in distinctive and provocative ways. Her famous trilogy Powers of Horror, Tales of Love and Black Sun shows her tracing the impress of the 'maternal' upon three classic sites of psychoanalytic interest: abjection, love and melancholy. These texts exemplify Kristeva's continuing concern to display how the repression (murder) of the mother offers the key to interpreting psycho-social traumas via the liminal insights of art and religion. Kristeva's preference for border territory beyond emigration and immigration controls places her own writing in the tradition of modernist literature. The writer, whose status is that of traveller and observer, offers her commentary upon this interrupted journey.
’, which was broadcast on the BBC on Halloween 2000. Aickman’s 1964 short story is a subtle and atmospheric horror tale about a mismatched honeymooning couple in a small town where the incessant pealing of church bells signifies the raising of the dead. The story is an ideal source for radio adaptation, with its aural register of tolling bells, multitudes of reanimated dead and the difficult, intimate relationship
's construction of this Ophelia figure is partially complicit with, yet also a challenge to, fetishised female victimhood. I then outline various Ophelia characters in twenty-first-century Japanese popular culture in which she appears in various roles that are all quite different from what one usually associates with Ophelia. I also consider certain Japanese legends and horror tales that link Ophelia with revengeful female ghosts and monsters, an image incongruous with Shakespeare's original character. I argue that these post-modern supernatural Ophelias are critical
erotic constellation at the Kinnear estate and might be the most excessive turn in a gothic plot full of nightmares and fantasies, dark mirrors, the grotesqueries of bodies, and horror tales. The most sensational horror tale that haunts Alias Grace is Susanna Moodie’s gothic history Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (1853), a history of Canadian
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
-realist writing (or of ‘literary’ versus ‘genre’ fiction). It is a good thing indeed that The Dead Zone is a paranormal horror tale; it is a good thing indeed that Jane Austen did not jazz up Northanger Abbey with biometamorphic chase scenes. Why is it, then, that Barker has left unexplored what we might call the Stephen King mixed-economy option – the option, that is, of
collection of collaborators was complete. Like Syberberg before him, Buttgereit evidently recognised that strand of Romantic irrationalism that had lain at the heart of German culture long before The horror of the Nazi past 29 the originary unification of the nation in the 1870s – an irrationalism that had manifested itself in Goethe’s rendering of the Faust legend, Hoffman’s tales of the unheimlich in prose and later still the horror tales of Weimar cinema, such as Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Like Syberberg before him