Daughters of Lilith : transgressive femininity in Bram Stoker’s late gothic fiction

Daughters of Lilith: Transgressive Femininity in Bram Stoker’s Late Gothic Fiction explore le thème de la transgression féminine dans quatre romans gothiques de Bram Stoker. En combinant les études féministes et les études de genre, cette thèse examine les différents visages de la dissidence féminine à travers Dracula (1897), The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), The Lady of the Shroud (1909) et The Lair of the White Worm (1911). Dans ces textes, la transgression est incarnée par la femme hystérique, la mère monstrueuse, la femme exotique et la New Woman. De plus, le traitement de ces stéréotypes féminins révèle une certaine tolérance envers la dissension féminine chez l’auteur. Souvent perçu comme un écrivain conservateur, Stoker est plutôt qualifié de progressiste dans cette thèse. L’inclusion de personnages féminins forts et déterminés à travers ses romans ainsi que ses rapports avec plusieurs féministes et proto-féministes dans sa vie privée témoignent de sa libéralité envers les femmes. Sa largeur d’esprit semble d’ailleurs évoluer tout au long de sa carrière ainsi qu’avec la progression du mouvement suffragiste britannique, une période mouvante à la fin du dix-neuvième et au début du vingtième siècle.

The Haunted castle; or, The child of misfortune. A Gothic tale.

Pages 13-16 of L.C. copy cropped.

Conjuring the Curse of Repetition or « Sleeping Beauty » Revamped : Angela Carter's Vampirella and The Lady of the House of Love

Abstract:This article illustrates Angela Carter's literary practice through her utilization of "Sleeping Beauty" in the radio play Vampirella and its prose variation The Lady of the House of Love. It argues that she vampirised European culture as she transfused old stories into new bodies to give them new life and bite. Carter's experiments with forms, genres and mediums in her vampire fiction capture the inherent hybridity of the fairy tale as it sheds new light on her main source, Charles Perrault's La Belle au bois dormant, bringing to the fore the horror and terror as well as the textual ambiguities of the French conte that were gradually obscured in favor of the romance element. Carter's vampire stories thus trace the 'dark' underside of the reception of the tale in Gothic fiction and in the subculture of comic books and Hammer films so popular in the 1970s, where the Sleeping Beauty figure is revived as a femme fatale or vamp who takes her fate in her own hands.Résumé:Cet article s'attache à montrer comment l'utilisation de La Belle au bois dormant dans deux histoires de vampire d'Angela Carter, la pièce radiophonique Vampirella et sa réécriture en prose The Lady of the House of Love, illustre la pratique littéraire de l'auteur, qui consiste à vampiriser la culture européenne et à transfuser les vieilles histoires dans de nouvelles formes, genres, et médias afin de leur donner une nouvelle vie. Le traitement du conte de fée permet d'aborder un aspect essentiel de la démarche créative de l'auteur, tout en offrant un éclairage inédit sur le conte de Perrault. En effet, Carter met en évidence les éléments inquiétants et l'atmosphère de menace qui caractérisent la deuxième partie du conte, tout en jouant sur les ambiguités du texte français souvent négligés au profit de la veine romanesque. A cet égard, ses histoires de vampire peuvent se lire comme une réflexion sur la réception 'obscure' du conte de fées dans la culture populaire, qui voit le personnage de la Belle au bois dormant prendre son destin en main et se réinventer en femme fatale ou vamp dans la bande dessinée et les séries B des années 1970.

The dark side of the Mediterranean : expression of fear from the inquisition to the present

Inside the stones of its most famous buildings, Évora keeps mysteries and secrets which constitute the most hidden side of its cultural identity. A World Heritage site, this town seems to preserve, in its medieval walls, a precious knowledge of the most universal and ancient human emotion: fear. Trying to transcend many of its past and future fears, some of its historical monuments in Gothic style were erected against the fear of death, the most terrible of all fears, which the famous inscription, in the Bones Chapel of the Church of São Francisco, insistently reminds us, through the most disturbing words: “Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos”. If the first inquisitors worked in central Europe (Germany, northern Italy, eastern France), later the centres of the Inquisition were established in the Mediterranean regions, especially southern France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Consequently, the roots of fear in Évora are common to other towns, where the Inquisition developed a culture of fear, through which we can penetrate into the dark side of the Mediterranean, where people were subjected to the same terrifying methods of persecution and torture. This common geographical and historical context was not ignored by one of the most famous masters of American gothic fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. Through the pages of The Pit and the Pendulum, readers get precise images of the fearful instruments of terror that were able to produce the legend that has made the first grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, a symbol of ultimate cruelty, bigotry, intolerance, and religious fanaticism, which unfortunately are still the source of our present fears in a time when religious beliefs can be used again as a motif of war and destruction. As Krishnamurti once suggested, only a fundamental realization of the root of all fear can free our minds.

Antes de Otranto: apontamentos para uma pré-história do gótico na literatura

Departing from Ariovaldo Vidal’s statement, in his foreword to the Brazilian translation of The Castle of Otranto, that the Gothic sources were spread upon literary and social history waiting for someone (Horace Walpole) to collect them in order to create a new literary genre, and connecting imagination to such statement, my purpose in this paper is to make some notes on what would possibly be these sources referred by Vidal. By the means of thinking on the Darkness as a semi-concept, a perspective largely inspired in Fred Botting’s Gothic (2014), I intend to look for the origins of Gothic fiction in texts by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

O reflexo do espelho não mostra a subalternidade: Drácula sob uma perspectiva pós-colonial

This paper aims to make a Postcolonial Reading of the Gothic novel Dracula, written by Bram Stoker. Most importantly, it is considered how the subaltern is silenced, and that how this silence reflects the characters responsible for the discourse construction in the book. For this purpose, the theories of three important writers of the Post-Colonialism, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, were studied, as well as the enlightening ideas of Stephen Arata in The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. It also verified the construction of Orientalism in Stoker's work, and its constitutively hybrid and transparent characters due the speech manipulation with the ideological filter of the hegemonic power. This manipulation also characterizes the fragmentation in the work, which is an indication, among others, of modernity in Stoker's novel

O reflexo do espelho não mostra a subalternidade: Drácula sob uma perspectiva pós-colonial

This paper aims to make a Postcolonial Reading of the Gothic novel Dracula, written by Bram Stoker. Most importantly, it is considered how the subaltern is silenced, and that how this silence reflects the characters responsible for the discourse construction in the book. For this purpose, the theories of three important writers of the Post-Colonialism, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, were studied, as well as the enlightening ideas of Stephen Arata in The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. It also verified the construction of Orientalism in Stoker's work, and its constitutively hybrid and transparent characters due the speech manipulation with the ideological filter of the hegemonic power. This manipulation also characterizes the fragmentation in the work, which is an indication, among others, of modernity in Stoker's novel

¿Ya nos conocemos? Apuntes sobre la intertextualidad en la serie Penny Dreadful

En este artículo se realiza un análisis de la serie televisiva "Penny Dreadull", creada por John Logan. Esta ficción articula elementos de la literatura gótica, el cine de terror y las publicaciones periódicas que dan su título a la serie. En esa amalgama, las referencias a diferentes ficciones clásicas del terror (las de Stoker, Shelley, Wilde y otros) son constantes, como así también las refundiciones de sus tramas y personajes. Esta investigación se adentra específicamente en la intertextualidad y las producciones de sentido que se dan en esta serie a partir del trabajo sobre la base de historias ya conocidas

¿Ya nos conocemos? Apuntes sobre la intertextualidad en la serie Penny Dreadful

En este artículo se realiza un análisis de la serie televisiva "Penny Dreadull", creada por John Logan. Esta ficción articula elementos de la literatura gótica, el cine de terror y las publicaciones periódicas que dan su título a la serie. En esa amalgama, las referencias a diferentes ficciones clásicas del terror (las de Stoker, Shelley, Wilde y otros) son constantes, como así también las refundiciones de sus tramas y personajes. Esta investigación se adentra específicamente en la intertextualidad y las producciones de sentido que se dan en esta serie a partir del trabajo sobre la base de historias ya conocidas

¿Ya nos conocemos? Apuntes sobre la intertextualidad en la serie Penny Dreadful

En este artículo se realiza un análisis de la serie televisiva "Penny Dreadull", creada por John Logan. Esta ficción articula elementos de la literatura gótica, el cine de terror y las publicaciones periódicas que dan su título a la serie. En esa amalgama, las referencias a diferentes ficciones clásicas del terror (las de Stoker, Shelley, Wilde y otros) son constantes, como así también las refundiciones de sus tramas y personajes. Esta investigación se adentra específicamente en la intertextualidad y las producciones de sentido que se dan en esta serie a partir del trabajo sobre la base de historias ya conocidas

«Soy vampiro, pero también una chica»: vampiros regenerados en True Blood

En la literatura y el cine góticos clásicos, el vampiro se concebía como un monstruo al que cabía eliminar. Sin embargo, en los últimos cuarenta años, novelas, películas y series revelan una voluntad de asimilarlo a la sociedad humana, un proceso conocido como domesticación o regeneración. Como metáfora de la diferencia sexual, racial, de género o de clase, tal asimilación representa, de acuerdo con los postulados de Foucault, una operación que lleva a cabo el poder para someterlas, integrándolas en el orden social y cultural establecido. La serie estadounidense True Blood (2008-2014) refleja a la perfección este proceso dual de regeneración que implica, a su vez, sometimiento. Relacionado con los supuestos de la corrección política, el nuevo monstruo ya no simboliza al «perverso» sino al «diferente» que se debe proteger y aceptar en el seno de la sociedad, pese al riesgo de cohesión social y amenaza para la familia que comporta.

The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture : Pop Goth

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.