Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2024.0186
Heidi Backes
{"title":"Poisonous Progress: Dark Fantasy, Violence, and the Fear of Change in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Espido Freire’s Irlanda","authors":"Heidi Backes","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2024.0186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2024.0186","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Spanish author Espido Freire’s Irlanda (1998) and American author Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) as parallel narratives that make full use of gothic transgression to highlight the trauma of progress in the lives of the young narrators. The teenage protagonists of both texts create realms of dark childhood fantasy for themselves and their sisters, using violence and witchcraft against their cousins (representatives of capitalistic, heteronormative values) as a reaction to their profound fear of change – a symptom of their liminal state between the progress that is expected of them and the stasis that they prefer. The pairing of these two novels showcases the gothic obsession with the subversion of linearity, demonstrating the trauma that results from societal insistence on continual growth according to traditional social and gender norms.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140272901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2024.0184
Manuel Aguirre
{"title":"Gothic Drift: The Case of ‘Raymond’ and ‘Arthur Kavanagh’","authors":"Manuel Aguirre","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2024.0184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2024.0184","url":null,"abstract":"Two opposed views of the history of Gothic fiction claim that a) the genre went into decline and ‘died’ in the early nineteenth century, and b) it has gone from strength to strength into the twenty-first century. This article defends a third hypothesis: that Gothic neither died nor endured but transformed into other genres to which the term ‘Gothic’ can apply analogically at best. Leaning on formal criteria (the codes or compositional conventions of eighteenth-century Gothic) it then offers a comparison between two short narratives thirty-three years apart, which, while being essentially ‘the same’ text, yet can be shown to belong to different genres. The article then projects the notion of language drift onto literary evolution to suggest that a form of genre drift accounts for this seeming oddity.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140275992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2024.0183
Ting-fu Chen
{"title":"Illuminating Obscurity: The Youming Lu and the Optical Dynamic in Early Medieval Chinese Gothic","authors":"Ting-fu Chen","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2024.0183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2024.0183","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads the Youming lu ( Records of the Hidden and Visible Realms) as an epitome of the central tension in the tradition of ‘anomaly accounts’ ( zhiguai) between a desire for order and an openness to uncertainties. By conceptualizing the zhiguai as ‘early medieval Chinese Gothic’, this article attempts to disclose the contemporary significance of a premodern non-Anglo-European genre, as well as unbind the Gothic from cultural or socio-historical determinism. It attends to an ambivalent solicitude for the obscure embedded in the Youming lu’s iconic dynamic of light and darkness to theorize such epistemic hospitality into an alternative enlightenment also crucial to the Gothic. Shifting the focus of globalgothic from ontology to epistemology, from the clearly marvelous to the interplay of clarity and obscurity, this article seeks to open up an intermediate space between cultural colonialism and esotericism, where the zhiguai, as ‘strange non-fiction’, can be considered to have prefigured a gothic sensitivity that in turn illuminates its own fictional potential which predated classical Chinese fiction proper.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140270432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2024.0187
Pauline Trotry
{"title":"‘I was right here, the whole time, none of you could see me’: Background Ghosts, Fear, and Vision in Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting (2018–2020)","authors":"Pauline Trotry","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2024.0187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2024.0187","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on Mike Flanagan’s Haunting series and brings the pervasive background ghost to the foreground of analysis by studying that which is, as expressed by young Nell in The Haunting of Hill House, ‘right here the whole time’ and yet cannot be seen. Using Jacques Derrida’s seminal notion of ‘spectre’ and its related ‘visor effect’ concept to build textual analyses of both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, this study demonstrates the ways in which the background ghost both reflects and challenges conventional horror dynamics of visuality and spectacularity. Such dynamics extend beyond the story space and involve the implied and near-sighted spectator, at once imperfect ghost-hunter and hunted by the background ghost. Such pervasive mechanics of haunting allow Flanagan to create a space of highly contemporary terror oozing from the screen to the implied viewer.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140271823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2023.0177
Tosha R. Taylor
{"title":"Gothic Doubling and Fractured Identity in Shōjo Manga: Yuki Kaori’s Angel Sanctuary","authors":"Tosha R. Taylor","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2023.0177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2023.0177","url":null,"abstract":"Despite enjoying a global fandom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Yuki Kaori’s manga series Angel Sanctuary (1994–2000) has received little consideration in studies of the Gothic. Yet the manga presents Gothic scholars with rich opportunities for locating manga, and particularly shōjo (young girls’) manga, within its own Gothic tradition. Steeped in global religious imagery, Angel Sanctuary uses incest, genderbending, and fractured identities to explore trauma and to critique the cross-cultural hegemonies that produce it. This essay considers the relationship between the Gothic and gendered identity in Japanese girls’ comics and investigates its manifestations in the manga’s depictions of incest, twins, and traumatic formations of the doppelgänger. In doing so, the essay locates Yuki’s work alongside the Female Gothic and argues for the increased inclusion of manga in Gothic scholarship.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139298624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2023.0174
Stuart Lindsay
{"title":"The Transgressive Bodies of Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens Line","authors":"Stuart Lindsay","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2023.0174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2023.0174","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the strategies employed by Dark Horse Comics to develop the Xenomorph creature and its associated universe across the publisher's Aliens line of titles. Through analysis of three Aliens miniseries’ story arcs that are representative of the line's narrative and structural innovation, my contribution explores how this corpus transgresses the parameters of the movie franchise's Science Fiction and action-horror genres in the following three ways. Firstly, I investigate the Aliens comics’ introduction of dreams and psychological trauma associated with the literary Gothic past in Aliens: Sacrifice (March–June 1993). Secondly, in keeping with the Gothic's comic turn, I examine the humorous, parodic, and self-referential elements of comics in Aliens: Stronghold (May–September 1994). Thirdly, I explore Dark Horse Comics’ critical understanding of negative nostalgia in preserving and transgressing the narrative structure and aesthetics of Alien (1979) in Aliens: Dead Orbit (April–December 2017). Ultimately, this article considers these three themes as examples of the paradoxically transgressive and restorative elements of Gothic that are apparent throughout Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens line. It argues that the ways in which the Aliens line innovatively reworks these aesthetic and narrative features of the film franchise's visual and thematic origins provide a critical understanding of the productive interactions between comics and literary Gothic traditions.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139300576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2023.0175
M. Tegan, Matthew J. Costello
{"title":"A Woman is Being Side-Kicked: Gothic Superheroes and the Suppression of Female Autonomy Amid Feminism’s Second Wave","authors":"M. Tegan, Matthew J. Costello","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2023.0175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2023.0175","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the treatment of women in the Gothic superhero comics of the 1970s through the lens of Michelle Massé’s In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (1992). While superhero texts generally neglected women even at the height of second-wave feminism, the Gothic superhero sub-genre goes even further, drawing on the regressive trope of the suffering woman to ‘side-kick’ female characters and deny their agency and autonomy. Exploring four female characters who share this fate, we examine their different responses to the Freudian beating fantasy enacted in their narrative arcs, delineating the high costs and limited gains of traumatised women who dream of triumph.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139292733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2023.0176
Matthew J. A. Green
{"title":"‘Keep it Gothic, Man’: Gothic and Graphic Medicine in Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor","authors":"Matthew J. A. Green","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2023.0176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2023.0176","url":null,"abstract":"Exploring the intersection of Gothic Medicine and Graphic Medicine in Ian William’s graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, this article discusses the ways in which gothic aesthetics, particularly representations of the abject encounter, contribute to an understanding of mental illness whilst also interrogating dominant paradigms within medical discourse. Further, this study suggests that the gothic aspects of comics as a medium contribute to the effectiveness of Gothic Medicine as a genre by offering insight into visual and verbal representations of the body. Detailed close readings indicate that Williams’s work draws a parallel between the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder on an individual level and the hostility toward the Gothic that formed a cornerstone in the foundation of modern medicine as a discipline.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139297139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2023.0178
Catherine Spooner
{"title":"My Friend the Devil: Gothic Comics, the Whimsical Macabre and Rewriting William Blake in Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Satania","authors":"Catherine Spooner","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2023.0178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2023.0178","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops the concept of the ‘whimsical macabre’, introduced in my book Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017) to refer to texts which deliberately fuse the comic and cute with the sinister, monstrous or grotesque. I propose that Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s graphic novel Satania (2016) extends the whimsical macabre in new directions, by drawing on the work of Romantic poet and artist William Blake, whose illustrated books are often cited as forerunners of modern comics. By rewriting Blake’s visionary account of a journey into the infernal regions in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) and alluding to Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789/1794), Satania reveals the serious ethical dimensions that underlie the whimsical macabre. In doing so, it interrogates and complicates the maturational narrative associated with children’s and young adult literature. The article concludes by suggesting that Satania’s heroine Charlie’s relationship with her demon draws on a Blakeian model of friendship in opposition, pointing towards a ‘reparative’ form of Gothic in which otherness is neither erased nor expelled, but embraced and cherished.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139298147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}