Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2021-03-10DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0085
Nicole C. Dittmer
{"title":"Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act. By Anna Gasperini","authors":"Nicole C. Dittmer","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0085","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43033988","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0076
Ailise Bulfin
{"title":"‘I'll touch whatever I want’: Representing Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Children's and Young Adult Gothic","authors":"Ailise Bulfin","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0076","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the metaphorical representation of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contemporary children's and young adult gothic works, focusing on the popular Series of Unfortunate Events and Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series. It argues that because of the upsetting nature of the issue and the numerous myths surrounding it, cultural production often uses the gothic figure of the monster who preys on children to address CSA indirectly, and identifies this strategy in the above series. It reveals a distinctly sexual charge to the monsters' victimisation of the children in both sets of narratives and explores their tendency to perpetuate CSA myths such as that of the perpetrator as a monstrous stranger. In conclusion, it considers how these narratives also challenge CSA myths and offer models of resilient child survivors, and it draws on cognitive cultural theory to theorise potential reader/viewer responses. Through its metaphorical imbrication of real-world brutality and dark fantasy, the Gothic is ultimately theorised as potentially affording more scope than realist treatments for touching on issues of transgression for wider and younger audiences, and sometimes in affirmative ways that move beyond merely recirculating myths and panic.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"21-42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48478206","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0078
Whitney S. May
{"title":"‘Powers of Their Own Which Mere “Modernity” Cannot Kill’: The Doppelgänger and Temporal Modernist Terror in Dracula","authors":"Whitney S. May","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0078","url":null,"abstract":"Of the many haunting figures that Gothic fiction invokes, none so perfectly encapsulates the mode itself, in all its fantastic incursions of opposing forces and clashing sensibilities, as the doppelgänger. Indeed, this figure in Gothic literature helps to push the bounds of subjective tension so central to the genre. This article examines Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) as an entry into the canon of doppelgänger fiction by complicating traditional readings of the central relationship between Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker. By revisiting the novel within the framework of a doppelgänger narrative, this article suggests that part of the real terror for Stoker's fin-de-siècle audience lies in the novel's timing. Located in the gap between the retreating Romantic and advancing high modern epochs, the novel dramatizes the apprehensions of a culture experiencing enormous technological and social upheaval. Specifically, it offers in its doubled pair a means to navigate those anxieties.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"60-76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46164727","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0079
Christopher Yiannitsaros
{"title":"Unhomely Counties: Gothic Surveillance and Incarceration in the Villages of Agatha Christie","authors":"Christopher Yiannitsaros","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0079","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the ways in which Agatha Christie's fictional villages may be interpreted as fundamentally gothic spaces. It makes the case that within the novels The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and The Moving Finger (1943), outdoor spaces do not offer the potential release from captivity that is set out in more traditional gothic paradigms. Instead, exterior landscapes surrounding and connecting homes function as a continuation of domestic interiority, thus acting as able accomplices in a gothic transformation of ‘home’ into ‘prison’. By examining the shifting meanings of panoptic surveillance present within these villages, and the outward extension of private family romances into more public forms of cruelty and humiliation, this article suggests that far from creating idyllic exemplars of English rurality, Christie's fictional villages work to unmask the dark, ‘unhomely’ core that lies buried at the very heart of the English ‘Home Counties’.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"77-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48155190","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0080
D. Wise
{"title":"Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Rats in the Walls’","authors":"D. Wise","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0080","url":null,"abstract":"The early short story ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1924) is recognized as the best of H. P. Lovecraft's fiction prior to ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, but this story is also non-cosmic and therefore (for some) not truly ‘Lovecraftian’. In conjunction with dense prose and seemingly throwaway references, this view has made ‘Rats’ arguably the most inadequately read of Lovecraft's major works. This article proposes that we read ‘Rats’, Lovecraft's first tale within an unofficial ‘witch cult’ trilogy, as a story of the path not taken in modern weird fiction. Using Henry James's ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908) as a companion piece, I argue that the international weird forms a major component of Lovecraft's text. Far from portraying horrors merely personal in scope, Lovecraft uses the Delapore family and their geographical dislocations between two distinct nation-states, America and England, to signal what he sees as the historical rise and fall – or evolution and de-evolution – of culture itself.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44665926","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0083
David Simmons
{"title":"Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture. By Sorcha Ní Fhlainn","authors":"David Simmons","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0083","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"118-120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46231212","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0084
L. Williams
{"title":"Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897. By Laurence Talairach","authors":"L. Williams","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0084","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"120-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46177185","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 : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0077
D. Cook
{"title":"Walter Scott's Late Gothic Stories","authors":"D. Cook","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2021.0077","url":null,"abstract":"While ‘Wandering Willie's Tale’, above all of Walter Scott's shorter fictions, has often been included in Gothic anthologies and period surveys, the apparently disposable pieces that appeared in The Keepsake for 1829, renegades from the novelist's failed Chronicles of the Canongate series, have received far less attention. Read in the unlikely context of a plush Christmas gift book, ‘My Aunt Margaret's Mirror’ and ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ repay an audience familiar with the conventions of a supernatural short story. But to keep readers interested, The Author of Waverley, writing at the end of a long and celebrated career in fiction, would need to employ some new gimmicks. As we shall see, the late stories are not literary cast-offs but recastings finely attuned to a bespoke word-and-image forum.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46130225","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}