Abstract
The sustained analytical teaching of “Gothic” fiction (now including film) has developed slowly and relatively recently, to say the least. For most of the twentieth century, despite its continuous production of Gothic tales, plays, and motion pictures, Gothic fiction-making has only rarely been deemed worthy of serious scholarly and student attention. One reason, of course, starting in the late eighteenth century soon after Gothic fiction began, has been the critical consignment of it to the “low culture” of “pulp” literature, which has long bred “an inherent distaste” among most academics “for a genre at once too visceral (and [supposedly] too ephemeral) and too popular.”1 This literary class system, too, has only been reinforced by the growing dominance of the so-called “New Criticism” from the 1930s to the mid-1960s. This mode of analysis based on an explicit theory of literary language, though never rigidly unified across its practitioners, commonly values the “organic” text: a tightly woven interaction among dense symbols whose conflicting overtones, while clearly in play, can be worked into a unity built out of the contradictions, a concordia discours peculiar to the truly “literary,” that establishes the best literature as dense high art within clear genres designed primarily for a coherent aesthetic response.
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Notes
Clive Bloom, “Horror fiction: in search of a definition,” in David Punter, ed., A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 157.
The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story, ed. W. S. Lewis and E. J. Clery (London: Oxford University Press, 1996) 9.
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Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: a Study of Gothic Romance (London: Constable, 1921).
Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: a Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (London: Dutton, 1927).
J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Constable, 1932).
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Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England (London: Arthur Barker, 1957) 206–31.
Maurice Levy, Le Roman “Gothique” Anglais, 1764–1824 (Toulouse: Association des Publications de la Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1968) 601–43.
Fred Botting, “Aftergothic: consumption, machines, and black holes,” in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 277–300.
Howells, Love, Mystery, and with “old” historicism in Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
See Freud, “Creative writers and day-dreaming,” trans. James Strachey, in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. edn (New York: Harcourt, 1992) 712–16.
Victor Sage, ed., The Gothic Novel: a Casebook (London: Longman, 1990) 113.
Wilson’s argument first appeared in “The ambiguity of Henry James,” Hound and Horn 7 (1934):385–406.
H. P. Lovecraft, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967) 141–3.
Maurice Richardson, “The psychoanalysis of ghost stories,” The Twentieth Century 166 (1959):419–31.
Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night thoughts on the Gothic novel,” Yale Review 52 (1963):236–57.
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), rev. edn (New York: Dell, 1966) 129.
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Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) 313–22.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) esp. 1–10.
Slavoj Zizek’s relevance for Gothic studies is well exemplified in A Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997).
Hogle, “Stoker’s counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and theatricality at the dawn of simulation,” in William Hughes and Andrew Smith, eds., Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan—now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) 205–24.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976) 90–110, 122–40.
Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: the Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988).
Julianne E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983).
Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Michelle Masse, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
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Phyllis A. Roth, “Suddenly sexual women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ” (1977).
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Jeffrey N. Cox, ed., Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1825 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992).
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Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
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Kari J. Winter, Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Woman and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
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H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Stephen J. Arata, “The Occidental tourist: Dracula and the anxiety of reverse colonization” (1990).
David Glover, “Travels in Romania— myths of origins, myths of blood” (1996), both in Byron, ed., Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays, 119–46 and 197–217. Note also Glover’s wider uses of cultural studies in Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Contexts (Basingstoke: Macmillan—now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
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Hogle, J.E. (2006). Theorizing the Gothic. In: Powell, A., Smith, A. (eds) Teaching the Gothic. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625358_3
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