Republicanism and the American Gothic , livre ebook

icon

98

pages

icon

English

icon

Ebooks

2009

icon jeton

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Lire un extrait
Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris
icon

98

pages

icon

English

icon

Ebook

2009

icon jeton

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Lire un extrait
Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

This book is a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s. It explores the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies. Specifically, it examines in detail the transatlantic influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American Revolutionary culture.


Voir icon arrow

Date de parution

01 septembre 2009

Nombre de lectures

1

EAN13

9781783163595

Langue

English

REPUBLICANISM AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC
S ERIES P REFACE
Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film.The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories.The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy.
Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholastic developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory.The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.
S ERIES E DITORS
Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan
Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi
E DITORIAL B OARD
Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts
Richard Fusco, St Joseph s University, Philadelphia
David Punter, University of Bristol
Chris Baldick, University of London
Angela Wright, University of Sheffield
Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
Republicanism and the American Gothic
Marilyn Michaud
Marilyn Michaud, 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2146-1
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-359-5
The right of Marilyn Michaud to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
LourensSmak/Alamy
C ONTENTS
Introduction
1 Republican Historiography
2 Vampires and the Cyclical Theory of History
3 The Double and Republican Masculinity
4 Conspiracy and Hypocrisy in Rosemary s Baby
5 Virtue and Corruption in Truman Capote s In Cold Blood
Afterword
Bibliography
Introduction

To penetrate fully into a work of literature is finally to make a serious effort to develop the historical imagination, to view the world . . . through another culture, another time, another nationality.
Joseph Anthony Mazzeo 1
The initial task of scholarship devoted to the Gothic is often an attempt at definition: what is Gothic? Typically, the discussion will begin with an exploration of the relationship between the nascent British form and its various progenitors followed by the inevitable conclusion that the term is fluid , troublesome and mutable . The solution, Fred Botting suggests, is more criticism: Elusive, phantom-like, if not phantasmatic, floating across generic and historical boundaries, Gothic (re) appearances demand and disappoint, and demand again, further critical scrutiny to account for their continued mutation. 2 In an effort to illuminate the genre, analysis has splintered into a host of thematic, temporal and regional subspecialities each functioning to demarcate the multiplicity of approaches and the changing interpretative needs orbiting the term Gothic . Yet, while these new readings challenge some durable myths surrounding the production, circulation and interpretation of texts, they too tend to be fragments, telling only part of the story of the Gothic s origin and meaning. The result is that significant explanatory relations often go unrecognized and, in particular, the relationship between the term s literary meaning and its prevalent historical and ideological usages. 3 This is particularly true in relation to the American Gothic which for many critics represents a troublesome contradiction. As Teresa Goddu argues, when modified by the word American, the Gothic loses all its usual referents ; not only does it lack the self-evident validity of its British counterpart , it is essentially antagonistic to American identity. 4 American Gothic, Robert Miles asserts, is an oxymoron signalling its own uncanniness : The Gothic ought to have undergone ideological erasure, foritsmeaning was essentially anti-American: it spelled entrapment, enclosure, the inescapable, parasitic power of the past, the inglorious triumph of class, feudalism, vestigial institutions, and even nature itself. 5
While it is no longer contentious to claim that American culture is drenched in Gothic sensibility , for many critics, its presence in the land of light and affirmation remains an unremitting paradox. 6 The popularity of American Gothic fiction indicates how ardently critics feel the need to explain the persistence of the form in a political and cultural environment seemingly divorced from traditional Gothic impulses. To account for a Gothic imagination in American culture, analysis has centred on psychology. Seen as a reflection of colonial anxieties, Puritan repression and pathological guilt resulting from the nation s encounter with slavery and Indian massacre, the parameters of the American Gothic are marked primarily by psychological, internalised, and predominately racial concerns . 7 In Love and Death in the American Novel , arguably the first work to focus exclusively on American Gothic writing, Leslie Fielder s reading of early American texts exemplifies this approach: European Gothic identified blackness with the super-ego and was therefore revolutionary in its implications; the American gothic . . . identified evil with the id and was conservative at its deepest level of implications, whatever the intent of its authors. 8 Unlike their British counterparts, American writers are always in a state of beginning, saying for the first time . . . what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest . For Fiedler, the Gothic is juvenile and repetitive because it deals primarily with a world of limited experience: a world American authors return to time and again due to their inability to deal with adult heterosexual love and [their] consequent obsession with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality . Contemporary writers, he claims, are doomed to repeat these patterns because they share a similar consciousness and the inescapable conditions of American life. Therefore, for Fiedler, the Gothic must be symbolically understood, its machinery and d cor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social and metaphysical . 9
Fiedler s analysis has had enormous influence on contemporary readings of American Gothic fiction. Propelled by his unequivocal announcement that the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror , subsequent critics constructed their analysis of the Gothic around the assumption that the psyche is more important than society . 10 As an explanation for why the Gothic is so at home on such inhospitable ground , Eric Savoy contends that Gothic narratives express a profound anxiety about historical crimes and perverse human desires that cast their shadow over what many would like to be the sunny American republic . Like Fielder, Savoy views the American Gothic as a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement . 11 In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative , Martin and Savoy claim their project is indebted and in many way supplementary to Fiedler s pioneering conjunction of historicism and psychoanalysis . For these critics, Fiedler s analysis has lost none of its freshness and provides the cultural frame for subsequent inquiry . 12 Yet, however valuable Fiedler s work has been to our understanding of American Gothic, it is useful to remember that his interpretative framework arises out of a political culture that eschewed social and ideological conflict in favour of an all-pervading liberal consensus. It was, as Daniel Bell declared, the end of ideology , a period in which academics were less interested in political history than in wresting the fiction of the American renaissance away from the Marxist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s and replacing it with a pluralist, consensus model free of the anti-capitalism of the Progressives and the formulism of the New Critics. The intellectual movement from Progressive to new liberal ideology was also contemporaneous with the development of the American studies curriculum in the 1950s and a new-found interest in the study of culture. Crystallizing this change was Lionel Trilling s The Liberal Imagination , a work that would come to dominate cultural theory in the mid twentieth century. While conservatives called for a life-drive in literature, for immersion in the American past, for recognition of progress and the goodness of man , Trilling emphasized the disenchantment of our culture with culture . 13 If the Progressive school interpreted American history as edging ever closer toward a form of democracy that would expose the material roots of conflict in class struggle, post-war liberals were suspicious of a linear model of progress and substituted a model of history characterized by ambiguity, paradox and irony. 14 Trilling s novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), exposes this interest in t

Voir icon more
The Twilight of the Gothic?
Category

Ebooks

The Twilight of the Gothic?

Joseph Crawford

The Twilight of the Gothic? Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

The Twilight of the Gothic?

Joseph Crawford

Book

151 pages

Flag

English

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic
Category

Ebooks

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic

Book

133 pages

Flag

English

Women s Authorship and the Early Gothic
Category

Ebooks

Women's Authorship and the Early Gothic

Women s Authorship and the Early Gothic Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Women's Authorship and the Early Gothic

Book

141 pages

Flag

English

Gothic Metaphysics
Category

Ebooks

Gothic Metaphysics

Jodey Castricano

Gothic Metaphysics Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Gothic Metaphysics

Jodey Castricano

Book

137 pages

Flag

English

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824
Category

Ebooks

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824

Carol Davison

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824 Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824

Carol Davison

Book

198 pages

Flag

English

The Gothic Ideology
Category

Ebooks

The Gothic Ideology

Diane Hoeveler

The Gothic Ideology Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

The Gothic Ideology

Diane Hoeveler

Book

159 pages

Flag

English

The Gothic Ideology
Category

Ebooks

The Gothic Ideology

Diane Hoeveler

The Gothic Ideology Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

The Gothic Ideology

Diane Hoeveler

Book

375 pages

Flag

English

Gothic Invasions
Category

Ebooks

Gothic Invasions

Ailise Bulfin

Gothic Invasions Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Gothic Invasions

Ailise Bulfin

Book

158 pages

Flag

English

Middle Eastern Gothics
Category

Ebooks

Middle Eastern Gothics

Karen Grumberg

Middle Eastern Gothics Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Middle Eastern Gothics

Karen Grumberg

Book

258 pages

Flag

English

Middle Eastern Gothics
Category

Ebooks

Middle Eastern Gothics

Middle Eastern Gothics Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Middle Eastern Gothics

Book

126 pages

Flag

English

The Nature of the Beast
Category

Ebooks

The Nature of the Beast

Carys Crossen

The Nature of the Beast Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

The Nature of the Beast

Carys Crossen

Book

137 pages

Flag

English

Gothic Machine
Category

Ebooks

Gothic Machine

David J. Jones

Gothic Machine Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Gothic Machine

David J. Jones

Book

123 pages

Flag

English

The Queer Uncanny
Category

Ebooks

The Queer Uncanny

Paulina Palmer

The Queer Uncanny Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

The Queer Uncanny

Paulina Palmer

Book

116 pages

Flag

English

History of the Gothic: American Gothic
Category

Ebooks

History of the Gothic: American Gothic

Charles Crow

History of the Gothic: American Gothic Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

History of the Gothic: American Gothic

Charles Crow

Book

250 pages

Flag

English

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism
Category

Ebooks

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism

Alex Bevan

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism Alternate Text
Category

Ebooks

Etudes littéraires

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism

Alex Bevan

Book

117 pages

Flag

English

Alternate Text