Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0023
A. Sanna
{"title":"Family Concerns in The Vampire Diaries","authors":"A. Sanna","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2019.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2019.0023","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the TV series The Vampire Diaries to show how the programme responds to traditional gothic tropes and transforms them for the television medium. Vampires and humans shall be read as both preoccupied with the ties of family, in story arcs that explore complex and often dark familial relationships. Especially in the early seasons of the series, objects such as magic rings, compasses, precious stones and magical devices are given fundamental importance for the development of the plot, the interactions among the characters, and the representation of familial bonds. Specifically, the search for and retrieval of the heirlooms shall be interpreted as instrumental to the representation of the characters’ relationships with their respective families, which I argue is a characteristic theme of gothic fictions at large.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43533226","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 : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0030
Jonathan Risner
{"title":"Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, ed. Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz","authors":"Jonathan Risner","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2019.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2019.0030","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42802030","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 : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0025
Hugh M. Ruppersburg
{"title":"The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic, ed. Susan Castillo Street and Charles L. Crow","authors":"Hugh M. Ruppersburg","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2019.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2019.0025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44438241","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 : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0021
B. Noad
{"title":"Gothic Truths in the Asylum","authors":"B. Noad","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2019.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2019.0021","url":null,"abstract":"This article suggests that Victorian Gothic prose fictions privilege the voices of madness, where, operating in the historical lunatic asylum, truth is encrypted. It begins by expanding upon the relevant background contexts of the nineteenth century, with focus upon the medicalisation of madness, and goes on to offer fresh critical interpretations of false confinement in two pinnacles of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction: the penny dreadful, The String of Pearls (1846–7), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The article argues that Gothic writing simultaneously registers and articulates the silence of a madness that has been perceived to threaten rational speech; Gothic subverts the view of the mental asylum as guarantor of truth by demonstrating that this functional site is, by contrast, the generator of falsehoods.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45171070","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 : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0020
M. Aguirre
{"title":"A Gothic-Folktale Interface","authors":"M. Aguirre","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2019.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2019.0020","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a study of a now forgotten tale published in 1765, ‘The Adventure of Count Beaumont’. It begins by showing that, in terms of motifs and techniques, the tale displays all the marks of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction; it then applies tools familiar to folklore scholars to argue that the tale in question is directly indebted to folktale type AT326. The argument eschews intuitive approximations and builds instead on an in-depth analysis of plot, structure and motifs and a survey of its publication history to show that the story blends two poetics, those of literature and folk narrative. The article argues that in consequence of this analysis it is legitimate to question the conventional demarcation – both geographical and historical – of eighteenth-century Gothic.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45782379","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 : 2019-09-18DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2019.0019
S. Yeager
{"title":"Gothic Paleography and the Preface to the First Edition of The Castle of Otranto","authors":"S. Yeager","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2019.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2019.0019","url":null,"abstract":"The first-edition preface to Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto contains a description of an imagined incunabulum, ostensibly witnessing the novel's text, which is attributed to an imagined translator, William Marshall. The incunabulum is said by Marshall to be printed in a ‘black letter’ typeface, a term which was already in this period a synonym for ‘gothic’ letterforms. This essay briefly summarizes the history of this classificatory term ‘gothic’ as it is applied to script, in order to provide further context for Walpole's parody of antiquarianism in the first edition preface and its relation to his use of the term ‘gothic’ in the subtitle to the novel's second edition.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46118372","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 : 2019-05-15DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0007
Curtis Runstedler
{"title":"The Benevolent Medieval Werewolf in William of Palerne","authors":"Curtis Runstedler","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the werewolf of the medieval romance displays behaviour comparable with modern studies of the wolf. In the dualistic medieval world of nature versus society, however, this seems inconsistent. How does the medieval werewolf exhibit realistic traits of the wolf? I examine the realistic lupine qualities of the werewolf Alphouns in the Middle English poem William of Palerne to justify my argument. Citing examples from his actions in the wilderness, I argue that Alphouns's lupine behaviour is comparable to traits such as cognitive mind-mapping and surrogate parental roles, which are found in contemporary studies of wolves in the wild. Recognising the ecology of the (were)wolf of the medieval romance helps us to understand better the werewolf's role as metaphor and its relationship to humans and society.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44582811","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 : 2019-05-15DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0006
S. Marsden
{"title":"‘One look and you recognize evil’: Lycan Terrorism, Monstrous Otherness, and the Banality of Evil in Benjamin Percy's Red Moon","authors":"S. Marsden","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Benjamin Percy's novel Red Moon (2013) navigates the problem of the ‘monster’ in the context of post-9/11 representations of Islamist terrorism. Structured around a series of terrorist atrocities carried out by lycan extremists, Percy's novel employs the werewolf as a figure of monstrous otherness in order to deconstruct the very processes of othering by which the monster is produced culturally and politically. Focusing on the distorted ethical justifications of the terrorists and on the roles of political opportunism and media manipulation in shaping US responses, the narrative allows both lycan terrorists and their political antagonists to emerge as more clown than monster. This article draws upon Hannah Arendt's account of the banality of evil, and its development by more recent privation theorists, to situate Red Moon within contemporary popular and theoretical discourses of evil and to read the novel as an interrogation of the processes by which our modern political ‘monsters’ are created.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43959955","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 : 2019-05-15DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0009
L. Nevárez
{"title":"Playgrounds in the Zombie Apocalypse: The Feral Child","authors":"L. Nevárez","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In the episode ‘The Grove’ (4.14) from AMC's The Walking Dead, Lizzie and Mika Samuels, sisters and two of the child survivors of the zombie apocalypse, brutally meet their ends. Lizzie, no longer able to distinguish between life and death, kills Mika, and Carol in turn shoots Lizzie, claiming that Lizzie ‘can't be around people’. These characters call into question the dividing line – if one remains, as established society crumbles – between human and animal, feral and civilised. The texts analysed in this article, AMC's The Walking Dead and Max Brooks's novel World War Z, include themes of re-socialising children and forming communities, or packs, in which the children can perhaps become rehabilitated into productive contributors. Viewing children in this light summons up viewer and reader responses to ‘horror’ that are more in keeping with reactions to real-life cases of abused and neglected ‘feral’ children than with the ‘horror’ produced by a zombie-themed text.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44891322","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 : 2019-05-15DOI: 10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0010
M. Brodski
{"title":"The Cinematic Representation of the Wild Child: Considering L'enfant sauvage (1970)","authors":"M. Brodski","doi":"10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/GOTHIC.2019.0010","url":null,"abstract":"In examining François Truffaut's L'enfant sauvage (1970), I will consider the feral child Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) with regard to the film's cinematic portrayal as typifying the cultural construction of a child. Following James R. Kincaid, the figure of the child can be seen as a ‘hollow category’, seemingly featureless in its alleged innocence. As a result, it functions as an adult ‘repository of cultural needs or fears’. For this reason, the child, and especially the feral child, can serve as a projection screen for a variety of different and even opposed questions and symbolic constructions. The film effects this subliminally through the portrayal of Victor. This is mainly achieved by constantly shifting between a Romantic discourse of the noble savage and child of nature and the Lockean empiricist view, with the infant's mind as a tabula rasa condition and the doctor Jean Itard's (played by Truffaut himself) consequent need to educate Victor.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42116596","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}