Reconsidering the relationship between early Gothic literature and the Greek classics: the cases of William Beckford and Matthew G. Lewis

The view that Gothic literature emerged as a reaction against the prominence of the Greek classics, and that, as a result, it bears no trace of their influence, is a commonplace in Gothic studies. This thesis re-examines this view, arguing that the Gothic and the Classical were not in opposition to one another, and that Greek tragic poetry and myth should be counted among the literary sources that inspired early Gothic writers. The discussion is organised in three parts. Part I focuses on evidence which suggests that the Gothic and the Hellenic were closely associated in the minds of several British literati both on a political and aesthetic level. As is shown, the coincidence of the Hellenic with the Gothic revival in the second half of the eighteenth century inspired them not only to trace common ground between the Greek and Gothic traditions, but also to look at Greek tragic poetry and myth through Gothic eyes, bringing to light an unruly, ‘Dionysian’ world that suited their taste. The particulars of this coincidence, which has not thus far been discussed in Gothic studies, as well as evidence which suggests that several early Gothic writers were influenced by Greek tragedy and myth, open up new avenues for research on the thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity of early Gothic literature. Parts II and III set out to explore this new ground and to support the main argument of this thesis by examining the influence of Greek tragic poetry and myth on the works of two early Gothic novelists and, in many ways, shapers of the genre, William Beckford and Matthew Gregory Lewis. Part II focuses on William Beckford’s Vathek and its indebtedness to Euripides’s Bacchae, and Part III on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk and its indebtedness to Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus. As is discussed, Beckford and Lewis participated actively in both the Gothic and Hellenic revivals, producing highly imaginative works that blended material from the British and Greek literary traditions.

The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic : Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative¦nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic¦challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic¦literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet¦argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general,¦is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when¦judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits.¦Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern¦with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended¦to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while¦slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum¦works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through¦suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman,¦and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and¦sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the¦century. Focusing on The Fall of the House of Usher, The Marble¦Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and The Yellow Wallpaper,¦Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further¦enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same¦time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance¦and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted¦to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to¦fascinate and disturb.

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.

"Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" : romantic imagery in Mary Shelley's Frankstein

Romantic English literature – written at a time when prose fiction was predominantly a medium for sheer entertainment – is rooted in poetry. One or two novelists may exceptionally be granted the adjective “Romantic”, but Mary Shelley is not ranked among them. For centuries, her work has been restricted to that section in handbooks reserved for exotic Gothic literature. This thesis argues that literary criticism has failed to recognize Frankenstein’s obvious relation with the movement. The argument will be fostered by a brief look at such handbooks, and developed through the analysis of the imagery of the novel, so as to trace the Romantic elements there contained. The analysis relies mainly on the frame developed by Northrop Frye concerning the nature and function of imagery in literature. The concept of intertextuality will also be useful as a tool to account for the insertion of images in the novel, and for the novel’s insertion within the Romantic context. The work is divided into three parts. The first contextualizes the main issues set forth by Frankenstein, establishing connections with the life of the author and with the Romantic movement. The second exposes the theoretical basis on which the thesis is grounded. The last presents my reading of the novel’s web of images. In the end, I hope to validate the thesis proposed, that Frankenstein embodies the aesthetic and philosophical assessments of the English Romantic agenda, and therefore deserves to be situated in its due place in the English Literary canon as the legitimate representative of Romanticism in prose form.

Frankenstein: uma releitura do mito de criação

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

As manifestações do gótico em Lovecraft: do Castelo de Otranto ao solar de Ward

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Sonhos e desvarios: o fantástico em Nodier e Gautier

The short stories of Charles Nodier and Théophile Gautier, respectively “Une Heure ou La Vision” (1806) and “La Morte amoureuse” (1836), while showing elements originating from the Gothic novel, are structured as fantastic narratives, rousing the ambiguity from the themes of dreams and madness. This article tries to highlight the resonances of Gothic literature in the selected short stories, as well as the characteristics which determine the fantastic and define it as a new subgenre in the European Romanticism.

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.

Ghosts in contemporary African diasporic literature : re-visioning history, memory and identity

Starting from the observation that ghosts are strikingly recurrent and prominent figures in late-twentieth African diasporic literature, this dissertation proposes to account for this presence by exploring its various functions. It argues that, beyond the poetic function the ghost performs as metaphor, it also does cultural, theoretical and political work that is significant to the African diaspora in its dealings with issues of history, memory and identity. Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) serves as a guide for introducing the many forms, qualities and significations of the ghost, which are then explored and analyzed in four chapters that look at Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1998), Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and a selection of novels, short stories and poetry by Michelle Cliff. Moving thematically through these texts, the discussion shifts from history through memory to identity as it examines how the ghost trope allows the writers to revisit sites of trauma; revise historical narratives that are constituted and perpetuated by exclusions and invisibilities; creatively and critically repossess a past marked by violence, dislocation and alienation and reclaim the diasporic culture it contributed to shaping; destabilize and deconstruct the hegemonic, normative categories and boundaries that delimit race or sexuality and envision other, less limited and limiting definitions of identity. These diverse and interrelated concerns are identified and theorized as participating in a project of "re-vision," a critical project that constitutes an epistemological as much as a political gesture. The author-based structure allows for a detailed analysis of the texts and highlights the distinctive shapes the ghost takes and the particular concerns it serves to address in each writer's literary and political project. However, using the ghost as a guide into these texts, taken collectively, also throws into relief new connections between them and sheds light on the complex ways in which the interplay of history, memory and identity positions them as products of and contributions to an African diasporic (literary) culture. If it insists on the cultural specificity of African diasporic ghosts, tracing its origins to African cultures and spiritualities, the argument also follows gothic studies' common view that ghosts in literary and cultural productions-like other related figures of the living dead-respond to particular conditions and anxieties. Considering the historical and political context in which the texts under study were produced, the dissertation makes connections between the ghosts in them and African diasporic people's disillusionment with the broken promises of the civil rights movement in the United States and of postcolonial independence in the Caribbean. It reads the texts' theoretical concerns and narrative qualities alongside the contestation of traditional historiography by black and postcolonial studies as well as the broader challenge to conventional notions such as truth, reality, meaning, power or identity by poststructuralism, postcolonialism or queer theory. Drawing on these various theoretical approaches and critical tools to elucidate the ghost's deconstructive power for African diasporic writers' concerns, this work ultimately offers a contribution to "speciality studies," which is currently emerging as a new field of scholarship in cultural theory.

Gustav Hasford's Gothic Poetics of Demystification

Gustav Hasford is the author of two important Vietnam War novels: The Short-Timers (1979), which was adapted by Stanley Kubrick into Full Metal Jacket (1987), and The Phantom Blooper (1990), its sequel. Relentlessly critical of the war that destroyed his generation, Hasford uses an array of Gothic themes, tropes and figures - such as the werewolf, vampire, and ghost - to describe the transformation of men into monsters that begins with basic training and can never be reversed. These and other Gothic devices allow Hasford to demystify and disenchant the Vietnam War, to strip it of euphemisms and official myths, and to reveal the violence that lays beneath. Unlike other well-known writers of the same generation, such as Michael Herr and Chris O'Brien, Hasford eschews postmodern techniques in order to pursue a rhetorical strategy of horror combined with black humor. The results are two novels of extraordinary ferocity, critical acumen and wit. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the specifically Gothic reading experience of ethical dilemma - a Gothic exercise in judgment - choreographed by both narratives.

Technical Challenges in the Construction of Gothic Vaults: The Gothic Theory of Structural Design

The construction of a Gothic vault implied the solution of several technical challenges. The literature on Gothic vault construction is quite large and its growth continues steadily. The main challenge of any structure is that, during and after construction, it must be "safe", that is, it must not collapse. Indeed, it must be amply safe, able to support different loads for long periods of time. Masonry architecture has shown its structural safety for centuries or millennia. The Pantheon of Rome stands today after almost 2,000 years without having needed any structural reinforcement (of course, the survival of any building implies continuous maintenance) . Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, finished in the 6th century AD, has withstood not only the dead loads but also many severe earthquakes . Finally, the Gothic cathedrals, with their appearance of weakness, are• more than a half millennium old. The question arises of what the source of this amazing strength is and how the illiterate master masons were able to design such daring and safe structures . This question is usually evaded in manuals of Gothic architecture. This is quite surprising, the structure being a fundamental part of Gothic buildings. The present article aims to give such an explanation, which has been studied in detail elsewhere. In the first part, the Gothic design methods "V ill be discussed. In the second part, the validity of these methods wi11 be verified within the frame of the modern theory of masonry structures . References have been reduced to a minimum to make the text simpler and more direct.

Return to Hanging Rock: Lost Children in a Gothic Landscape

Using the philosophical position of phenomenology this article examines the ways in which ideas of wildness combine with Australian Gothic tropes such as the white colonial lost child and the bush as a haunted locale to compose key features of an Australian Ecogothic. Joan Lindsay’s enigmatic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) has prompted scholars such as Lesley Kathryn Hawkes to describe how in Australian literature for both adults and children ‘the environment is far more than a setting or backdrop against which the plot takes place’ (Hawkes, 2011,67). On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 three young Australian girls and their teacher disappear from a school picnic at the ancient site of Mount Macedon in Victoria. The analysis, which focuses on Lindsay’s posthumously published chapter eighteen (1987) examines how elements of the material, sensing world combine with the mythological or sacred to connect the human protagonists with the gothic landscape they inhabit. The resulting intersubjectivity problematizes colonial ideology and unsettles notions of national identity. Using the philosophical position of phenomenology this article examines the ways in which ideas of wildness combine with Australian Gothic tropes such as the white colonial lost child and the bush as a haunted locale to compose key features of an Australian Ecogothic. Joan Lindsay’s enigmatic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) has prompted scholars such as Lesley Kathryn Hawkes to describe how in Australian literature for both adults and children ‘the environment is far more than a setting or backdrop against which the plot takes place’ (Hawkes, 2011,67). On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 three young Australian girls and their teacher disappear from a school picnic at the ancient site of Mount Macedon in Victoria. The analysis, which focuses on Lindsay’s posthumously published chapter eighteen (1987) examines how elements of the material, sensing world combine with the mythological or sacred to connect the human protagonists with the gothic landscape they inhabit. The resulting intersubjectivity problematizes colonial ideology and unsettles notions of national identity.