Neo-Gothic Narratives , livre ebook

Anthem Press

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

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

166 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

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

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A theory on what mobilises the employment of the Gothic in the present times

Recent years have seen the strong development of Neo-Victorian studies, including its theorisation by such scholars as Cora Kaplan, Sally Shuttleworth, Ann Heilmann, Christian Gutleben, Marie-Louise Kohlke, Mark Llewellyn and others. It is a focus that has engaged literary critics from around the globe like Carmen Veronica Borbély (Romania), Susanne Gruß (Germany), Tiffany Gagliardi Trotman (Spain), Hitomi Nakatani (Japan), Agnieszka Matysiak (Poland), Max Duperray (France), Jeanne Ellis (South Africa) and Van Leavenworth (Sweden) to name just a few. [NP] ‘Neo-Gothic Narratives’ defines and theorizes what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

Acknowledgements; Introduction Neo- Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew, Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier; Chapter One “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace, Brenda Ayres; Chapter Two Dark Descen(den)ts: Neo- Gothic Monstrosity and the Women of Frankenstein, Sarah E. Maier; Chapter Three Theorising Race, Slavery and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo- Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights, Carol Margaret Davison; Chapter Four Toxic Neo- Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde, Tyler Durden and Donald J. Trump as Angry White men, Martin Danahay; Chapter Five Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows, Jamil Mustafa; Chapter Six “Here we are, again! ”: Neo-Gothic Narratives of Textual Haunting, from Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem to The Limehouse Golem, Ashleigh Prosser; Chapter Seven Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo- Gothic Australian novels, Kate Livett; Chapter Eight “We Are all humans”: Self- Aware Zombies and Neo- Gothic Posthumanism, Karen E. Macfarlane; Chapter Nine Neo- Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History, Jessica Gildersleeve and Nike Sulway; Chapter Ten Doctor Who ’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo- Gothic, Geremy Carnes; Chapter Eleven The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic, Brenda Ayres; Notes on Contributors; Index.

Sujets

Literary criticism

LGBT

Informations

Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	31 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785272196
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Neo-Gothic Narratives
Neo-Gothic Narratives
Illusory Allusions from the Past
Edited by
Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2020 Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-217-2 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-217-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Dedicated to those readers who love to feel their hair standing up on the back of their necks
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction Neo-Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew
Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier
Chapter One “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace
Brenda Ayres
Chapter Two Dark Descen(den)ts: Neo-Gothic Monstrosity and the Women of Frankenstein
Sarah E. Maier
Chapter Three Theorising Race, Slavery and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo-Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights
Carol Margaret Davison
Chapter Four Toxic Neo-Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde, Tyler Durden and Donald J. Trump as Angry White men
Martin Danahay
Chapter Five Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula , Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows
Jamil Mustafa
Chapter Six “Here we are, again! ”: Neo-Gothic Narratives of Textual Haunting, from Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem to The Limehouse Golem
Ashleigh Prosser
Chapter Seven Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo-Gothic Australian novels
Kate Livett
Chapter Eight “We Are all humans”: Self-Aware Zombies and Neo-Gothic Posthumanism
Karen E. Macfarlane
Chapter Nine Neo-Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History
Jessica Gildersleeve and Nike Sulway
Chapter Ten Doctor Who ’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo-Gothic
Geremy Carnes
Chapter Eleven The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic
Brenda Ayres
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Robert J. Moore, who granted us permission to use his painting Proof of Life on our cover.
We are so grateful for the pioneering work in the Gothic by Fred Botting, David Punter, Andrew Smith and Montague Summers; followed by the twenty-first century scholarship of Ellen Brinks, Glennis Byron, Markman Ellis, Maggie Kilgour, Diane Long Hoeveler, Catherine Spooner, Dale Townshend and so many others who have helped us understand more about ourselves through their analysis of Gothic literature. As for neo-Gothicism, we are grateful for the frontrunners Nadine Boehm-Schnitker, Marie-Luise Kohlke, Susanne Gruss, Christian Gutleben and Diana Wallace, who have offered significant insights as to why we, as post-postmoderns, like to look at the “Victorians in the rearview mirror,” a phrase borrowed from Simon Joyce.
We want to express our great appreciation for the contributors of this volume: Geremy Carnes, Martin Danahay, Carol Davison, Jessica Gildersleeve, Karen Livett, Karen E. Macfarlane, Jamil Mustafa, Ashleigh Prosser and Nike Sulway.
Thanks go to Liberty University student Avery M. Powers, who worked as an intern and helped with proofing this manuscript.
Ayres would like to thank the generosity of Penn State’s library, which loaned her hundreds of books and articles in order to do this project.
Maier’s enthusiasm for this project was conceived in discussions with University of New Brunswick students who love a good scare: Belinda Balemans, Genevieve Crowell, Connor DeMerchant, Rachel Friars and Jessica Raven. BOO! For introducing her to her love of the art of chilling the blood, thanks to Glennis (Stephenson) Byron. For his mentorship, Donald MacPherson, her grade 12 English teacher, whose haunting voice she still hears. Her gratitude to Gido, and of course, most importantly, for letting her borrow Frankie Stein, her love to Violet—always always.
Introduction
Neo-Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew
Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier
You notice the turreted pink elephant as you pass the Tube entrance at The Elephant and Castle. You consider yourself a scholar of the Gothic, so the irony of the statue is not lost on you. “I wonder […] what an elephant’s soul is like,” you quote to yourself from Dracula and chuckle. 1 Then you remember the elephant and castle that appeared in margins of several Gothic manuscripts on display at the British Library. No wonder your physician is sending you to a therapist. “You are a postmodern who is not coping well in this century,” he said. “You escape into the past and live inside Gothic books and movies.” Forcing yourself to be polite but, after all, you do have academic pride, you refrain from informing him that we are now in the post-postmodern age. Besides, you don’t know what that means, but he would probably shake his head and deduce that you are more deranged than he originally thought.
Your taxi deposits you somewhere in Walworth. Before you can close the car door, the taxi driver, with his pronounced Eastern European accent, speeds off as if he saw a ghost. Then you turn around and find yourself standing before a rickety old bridge that dares you to cross a moat that leads to two turrets, and you instantly think of Wemmick’s Castle in Dickens’ Great Expectations . You double check the address to make sure that it is the clinic that you are supposed to visit for help with your nerves. “It’s probably run by someone crazier than I am,” you mumble to yourself. Maybe it is a meeting place for support groups with unhealthy Gothic obsessions, beginning with the shrink in charge.
You are tempted to turn around, but the cab has left you, so you brave the crossing only to halt before a sign that reads, “Beware of Piranhas.” You peer over the side and spot a frenzy of teeth and blood and hair of some hapless stray who must have ventured into the murky water.
This cannot be good for your nerves.
“Oh, it is an unusual clinic,” Dr. Frankenstein had mentioned with a twinkle in his eye, which you now realise that you mistook as his confidence in your road to recovery. You gaze up at the crenellate parapet and notice that even though it is midday, bats are leisurely soaring around it, and their chatter sounds as if they are plotting your demise. You hope your Valium will soon kick in.
Hesitating before a door knocker that you know was Dickens’ inspiration in A Christmas Carol , you are relieved to see a doorbell and decide to use that instead. When you push it, however, you hear the sound of a dying cow and remember that that was the “chime” for the Addams family. 2 Your better sense tells you to go back, but as the portal creeps open, you peer into the darkness and are alarmed that there is no receptionist, no nurse, no doctor to greet you. Still, morbid curiosity propels you inside.
The door slams behind you.
If you are intrigued with the neo-Gothic, whether reader, writer or another sort of fan, then you may be the “you” above. You share a postmodernist propensity to be “fundamentally concerned […] with the ontological and epistemological roots of the now through a historical awareness of then (Kaplan 2008 , 4). The way you cope with the present is to “turn around and step back” (Gutleben 2001 , 10) and are thus trapped in the castle. “This,” your colleague Christian Gutleben assures you, “is the fundamental aporia of nostalgic postmodernism” (10). Or, as another colleague, Simon Joyce, puts it, you are driving ahead while keeping your eyes on the past in your rearview mirror ( 2007 , 3).
When that same mirror is used to look back to the Gothic from an interrogative, postmodern position, it appears that Gothicism is metamorphical, meaning it is shapeshifting: What Gothic literature was in the first centuries was very different from the Gothic during early Medievalism and morphed into something else by the middle and late “Dark Ages,” and so on. By the time Horace Walpole and then Sir Walter Scott had become so enthralled with medievalism that they built Strawberry Hill and Abbortsford, respectively, Medieval Gothicism morphed into something else. Diana Wallace in her Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic argues that Gothic literature was already metafiction, avant la lettre , in its generation of historical text ( 2013 , 1). The term “Gothic” implies a return to the past, or to put it into Gothic terms, the past never stays dead—it is self-reflexive because it deals with the undead in the present. Then neo-Gothicism is doubly reflexive as it reflects on the reflection of the past