Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0139
Maisha L. Wester
{"title":"The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-Century Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils","authors":"Maisha L. Wester","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0139","url":null,"abstract":"‘The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness’ considers the intersections between Gothic texts and moral panics, a sociopolitical mechanism first theorized by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). I revise Cohen's theory to clarify the peculiar eruptions of exponentially violent anti-Black discourses across various eras, noting that the folk devils targeted by moral panics are invariably abject figures upon which society projects a gothic visage. I reveal how the era of the (Anti-)Slavery debates exemplifies the reduction of Black populations to abject folk devils demonized amid white, western moral panics. The essay then explores Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis's Isle of Devils to expose how the moral panic over socioeconomic shifts, white cultural degeneration and slavery manifests in Gothic texts. Lastly the essay reveals how societies re-articulate the tropes and characteristics of such fictional Black ‘devils’ in their discussions of real populations, and the consequences of such renderings.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45009059","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0145
Ashley Kniss
{"title":"The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. By Elizabeth Parker","authors":"Ashley Kniss","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0145","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48064779","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0143
Madelyn Marie Schoonover
{"title":"Indigenous Futurisms and Decolonial Horror: An Interview with Rebecca Roanhorse","authors":"Madelyn Marie Schoonover","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0143","url":null,"abstract":"This interview with Black and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo author Rebecca Roanhorse explores the innovations she has brought to horror and science-fiction genres by speaking from the colonial difference and centring Indigenous histories, cosmologies, and spirituality in her works. The influence of Grace Dillon’s concept of Indigenous Futurisms on Roanhorse’s oeuvre is explored, as is the importance of Indigenous representation in white-dominated literary fields and how such representation can resist colonial repression while empowering Indigenous people in real life. Finally, Roanhorse speaks to the ways in which corporations such as Lucasfilm and Marvel are increasingly acknowledging a historic lack of diversity – or a historic offensive stereotyping of marginalised groups – and actively working to undo this harm by producing series entirely created by Indigenous writers that expand opportunities and give them the license to create stories from their unique cultural perspective.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43026445","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0144
Rebecca Duncan
{"title":"Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies","authors":"Rebecca Duncan","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0144","url":null,"abstract":"This article theorises decolonial Gothic as a novel approach to Gothic fiction from formerly colonised regions and communities. It responds to an emerging body of Gothic production, which situates itself in a world shaped by persistently racialised distributions of social and environmental precarity, and where colonial power is thus an enduring material reality. To address such fiction, the article proposes, requires a reassessment of the hauntological frameworks through which Gothic and the (post)colonial have hitherto been brought into contact. Forged in the cultural climate of late-twentieth-century postmodernity, these hinge on the assumption of an epochal break, which renders colonial history a thing of the past; thus, they fall short of narratives that engage with active formations of colonial power. Accordingly, the article outlines an alternative approach, positioning Gothic fiction in the context of the capitalist world-system, which – into the present – is structured by colonial categories of race, heteropatriarchal categories of gender, and instrumentalising discourses of nature as plunderable resource.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48223418","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0142
Giulia Champion
{"title":"Decolonising Deep-Sea Gothic: Perspectives from the Americas","authors":"Giulia Champion","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0142","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that gothic tropes are central to depictions of the ocean across different genres and forms, but there is a colonial and decolonial trend in the use of horror in portrayal of the sea. This article identifies how gothic depictions of the deep-sea form part of a specific tradition of ecophobic representations of the deep in western narratives aiming to control and commodify. These depictions are profoundly marked by colonial legacies, as this paper shows by analysing briefly Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’ (1896) and William Eubank’s film Underwater (2020). The article then considers how gothic tropes persisting in post-colonial and decolonial cultural productions serve to identify, first, structural colonial violence still present today; and second, an anxiety about our ecosystem in a time of climate crisis in Rita Indiana’s novel La Mucama de Omicunlé (2015) and works emerging from the Caribbean and Latin America.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46429278","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0132
Sarah Cleary
{"title":"Better the Devil you Know: The Myth of Harm and the Satanic Panic","authors":"Sarah Cleary","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0132","url":null,"abstract":"The 1980s were a time of big hair, big cars, big phones, and big panics. Yet no panic has ever come close to the hysteria generated by the ‘Satanic Panic’. It was an episode which encompassed an entire decade, spilling into the 1990s as well as into further child-centric narratives of harm such as the 1980s video nasty controversy in the UK. Beginning with the McMartin preschool trial in California in 1983, the satanic panic was a fear that America, or at the very least its white suburban middle class, was under a subversive form of attack from satanic forces. In a perfect storm of disparate cultural elements, satanic panic gained momentum in the wake of the McMartin ritual abuse allegations. Not unsurprisingly, all claims were unfounded and eventually quashed, but not before the ritual abuse cases and their alleged victims were paraded in the news media. This was indeed a real-life horror story and throughout this article, by reading the panic as a Gothic tale of excess, I wish to introduce a liminal narrative composed of hysteria, lies and media sensationalism henceforth known as ‘the myth of harm’. A complex composite of various social narratives, the myth of harm functions as both a vehicle for the articulation of our fears, while simultaneously capable of mobilising and often weaponising them, especially when those fears are directed towards children.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47366989","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0129
Harvey O'Brien
{"title":"Creation Myth: The Imagining of the Gothic Imagination in the Diodati Triptych: Gothic (1986), Haunted Summer (1988), and Remando al viento (1988)","authors":"Harvey O'Brien","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0129","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that amid the slasher carnage, three 1980s gothic films representing the literary imagination of Frankenstein attempted to proffer a vision of horror rooted in creation rather than death. In so doing they reinvigorate the radical roots of horror as a challenge to the status quo: a reconfiguration of life into forms which awaken fears as characters face precarious destinies haunted by their past. Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986), Ivan Passer’s Haunted Summer (1988), and Gonzalo Suárez’s Remando al viento / Rowing with the Wind (1988) all depict Mary Shelley facing personal and social challenges from her (male) peers including Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Arguably it is Mary who will in time emerge as an even more enduring literary voice, evinced by the fact of her being the protagonist of these films. During the Summer at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where each of these authors sought to create stories of horror, the films imagine the psychosexual power games and intellectual debates which surrounded these literary conjurations. All three films also depict an intrusion of the supernatural as Mary’s monster actually manifests in the liminal space between waking and dreaming. Though wildly different in tone and affect, all three films represent a Gothicism (or an adjacent Gothic allusion) distinct from either the nostalgic or the dismissive deployment of its tropes in other genre films at the time and in so doing raise questions about 1980s cinema and culture more broadly.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48392239","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0130
J. D’Arcy
{"title":"‘We can believe he does not see her, nor know she’s there’: Erasure and The Woman in Black","authors":"J. D’Arcy","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0130","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on a 1980s theatrical adaptation of a 1980s novel from the vantage point of the twenty-first century; the production experienced by the author was a live performance in its twenty-fifth anniversary year. The Woman in Black, adapted from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, has run virtually unchanged since its transfer to the West End in the late 1980s. While the Woman has been read as a feminist depiction of a female ghost who defies patriarchal control, this article argues that such readings are mitigated by the material performance and marketing strategies necessary for the creation of a commercially successful Gothic horror production. While the play mirrors the novel’s depictions of 1980s cultural horrors, its apparent depiction of a powerful female ghost elides the various strategies which contain and limit that power, and work to erase the actor. The production’s unusually long run serves to emphasise these Gothic erasures, elisions, and sleights of hand.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49338924","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0133
James R. Morgart
{"title":"‘Everyone Has Monsters Within’: Neoliberal Release of Monstrous Desire in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986)","authors":"James R. Morgart","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0133","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that filmmaker Stuart Gordon uses the Gothic to critique neoliberal desires that proliferated during the 1980s and continue to exist today. Gothic tropes, particularly monstrosity, coincide with the political in a number of Gothic works by filmmakers such as Tobe Hooper, Larry Cohen, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. Examining a number of these works reveals that monstrosity is designated to characters who privilege individual desires over the community; however, by closely reading Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986) alongside these films, I argue that Gordon’s films offer the more chilling recognition for audiences that neoliberalism’s real power is in its ability to adapt itself to appeal to and ultimately exploit our desires no matter how benevolent we believe them to be.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48802535","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 : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0120
I. Duncan
{"title":"Scott's Ghost-Seeing","authors":"I. Duncan","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0120","url":null,"abstract":"Episodes of ghost-seeing radicalize a key device of Walter Scott’s historical novels, in which cultural difference submits to a developmental logic of historical difference. The spectral apparition signals not only the ghost-seer’s imminent death but also a historical extinction, that of the life-world in which supernatural phenomena count as real. This essay considers the complication of this historicist logic in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and The Monastery (1820). In the former, ghostliness is endemic to a time of pure liminality, unmoored from historical purpose: the suspension of the present between a past that fails to pass and a future that fails to arrive empties it of ontological substance. In The Monastery, the ghost rudely resists exorcism by rational explanation. Scott’s White Lady indexes the severity of the historical breach inflicted by the Protestant Reformation: a discontinuity more violent, in its impact upon knowledge, belief and the imagination, than revolutions of dynasties or political systems.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41416226","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}