Female Gothic Fiction, Grotesque Realities, and Bastard Out of Carolina: Dorothy Allison Revises the Southern Gothic

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 269-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Dunn Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Dorothy Allison ◽  
Southern Gothic ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
Bastard Out Of Carolina

scholarly journals Formations of Player Agency and Gender in Gothic Games

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Krzywinska
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Way

This last chapter explores the connections between the design of player agency and formations of gender in Gothic video games. The conditions of player agency drain power from the more radical and subversive gender formations often found in Gothic fiction itself but in some games a more subtle, ambiguous or subversive approach to player agency is taken. Here alternative methods and contextualising representations are deployed by game designers to create models of player agency that do not, through the usual trope of mastery, align with dominant notions of masculinity or a phallic economy. The focus in this chapter is therefore mainly on the role of players in the thick of the Gothic game text and the gendered, contextual economy of the power (or powerlessness) that they are afforded. Such games actively invite the interest of women and girl players. Certain iterations of Gothic can be used very effectively in games to disquieten and demythologise the thoughtless formations of agency and gender that are perpetuated by many games directed at men and boy players, and may be termed ‘Female Gothic’ because of the way they show gender to be constructed or performed.

Dorothy Allison: Revising the “White Trash” Narrative

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Langhorne
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Dorothy Allison ◽  
White Trash ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Central Florida ◽  
Bastard Out Of Carolina

This chapter discusses the life and work of Dorothy Allison, who knows about growing up “white trash.” Born on April 11, 1949, in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison was “the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family.” Poverty forced Allison's family to leave South Carolina for central Florida in search of a better life. In 1983, Allison published a collection of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, followed by a short story collection, Trash, in 1988. In 1992, Allison published Bastard out of Carolina, a largely autobiographical novel about growing up in the Rough South. Allison's other works include chapters and a memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995). The term “white trash” and its prevalence demonstrate society's tolerance of stereotyping poor whites. Such stereotypes not only portray to outsiders a false image of the working class, but are reinforced within the working class itself. Allison writes to combat this myth and these prejudices.

Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherryl Vint
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
British Culture

This chapter explores the connections between dystopian science fiction and gothic fiction. It links science fiction to a tradition of European utopian and surrealist writing, situating the genre equally within discourses of science and the gothic. This perspective, the chapter argues, was perhaps more possible from the vantage point of 1973 than it would have been for earlier critics: the scientific romance tradition was rooted in a Victorian culture that believed in empire, technology, and progress, even if it was not always convinced by their contemporary instantiations. The dramatic shifts in British culture during the Blitz and in the immediate post-war period looked back on such optimism with a rather jaundiced eye: British global hegemony was distinctly at an end. It is little wonder, then, that the speculative fictions of this period turned toward darker tones of dystopia and the gothic.

In a Glass Darkly? Narrating Death and the Afterlife in J. Sheridan Le Fanu

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Feminist Theology ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
The Demonic

Chapter 10 compares the work of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emmanuel Swedenborg. Le Fanu is closely connected to Maturin and copies a number of his tropes in ‘Spalatro’: mimetic contagion, blood for money, the demonic tempter, and suicide. Le Fanu, aware of the deathliness of his Anglo-Irish culture, seeks ways to engender life and movement through narrating and revealing death so that a transcendence beyond can be imagined. He is compared to Poe, whose female protagonists remain entrapped by materiality even as they seek to escape it, and shown to be more grotesque. He uses Swedenborg to render the afterlife itself material and real, especially through his spiritual creatures, and to make the transcendent the cause of the natural. A proto-feminist theology yokes female Gothic entrapment to the power of death, and the heroines of ‘Schalken the Painter’ and ‘Carmilla’ apocalyptically reveal the presence of death in its grotesque materiality, while the women of Uncle Silas act as agents of heavenly charity.

Cain’s Castles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Acts And Monuments

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

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