scholarly journals In a Victorian fog: constructing identities in female gothic novels.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayley Salo
Keyword(s):  
2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Michelle Gadpaille

Ellen Ross (1816?–1892) emigrated from Scotland to Montreal at mid-century and wrote two Gothic novels, in one of which – Violet Keith, An Autobiography (1868) – she used the Canadian setting as a fantastic Gothic locale in which to explore areas of social and sexual transgression. Drawing on earlier traditions of European Gothic, including Sir Walter Scott’s mythologized Scottish landscape, and on an emerging North American genre of convent exposes, Ross’s writing accommodates female protest, distances it from reality and allows its dissipation in conventional denouements. If female Gothic can be read as an analogue of realistic women’s problems, then perhaps this analogy can be extended to encompass emigration and immigrant life. The paper analyzes Ross’s motifs of loss, imprisonment, solitude, surveillance and deliverance and considers the possibility that Gothic motifs in her work both conceal and express features of the immigrant’s psychic battle with the transition to the New World.


Author(s):  
Alison Milbank

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.


Author(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Claudia L. Johnson

‘… in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.’ Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their romantic excess and dark overstatement feed her imagination, as tyrannical fathers and diabolical villains work their evil on forlorn heroines in isolated settings. What could be more remote from the uneventful securities of life in the midland counties of England? Yet as Austen brilliantly contrasts fiction with reality, ordinary life takes a more sinister turn, and edginess and circumspection are reaffirmed alongside comedy and literary burlesque. Also including Austen's other short fictions, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, this valuable new edition examines the ambitious and innovative works with which she inaugurated as well as closed her career.


2020 ◽  
Vol 04 (04) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Priydarshi ◽  

Northanger Abbey’ is a commentary on as well as satire of the popular Gothic novels of Austen’s era. She was exploiting public interest in the creaky house, creaky older man and frightened virginal young heroine tropes of the era’s popular Gothic novel. As it is in one of the hardest novels of Austen, people miss its satire. Here, we get a brilliant satire on the ridiculousness of the events, settings, and emotions of gothic novels in general.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 35-43
Author(s):  
Vesna Marinko

One of the most shocking Gothic novels was written by Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1796. His Gothic novel The Monk contains all the typical Gothic elements such as a ruined castle, aggressive villain, women in distress, the atmosphere of terror and horror and a lot more. This article analyses and compares to what extent the Gothic elements of the late 18th century survived in the contemporary detective story The Ice House (1993) written by Minette Walters and how these elements have changed.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Laure MASSEI-CHAMAYOU

If Jane Austen admits in her correspondence that she was eventually pleased with Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), the Anglican theologian nonetheless endorsed the prejudices shared by most eighteenth-century moralists towards novels. Now, in Northanger Abbey, a novel filled with literary allusions, Jane Austen’s narrator bravely takes the opposite view by launching into a bold defence of the genre. Besides resorting to a biting irony to scrutinize her society’s axioms, rules and power relations, her novels notably question Manichean representations of masculine and feminine roles. Jane Austen’s choice to distance herself from the strictly gendered models inherited from conduct books, sentimental, or gothic novels, further combines with her questioning of generic conventions. This article thus aims at exploring how Jane Austen engaged with these representations while articulating her subtle didacticism. Her aim was not merely to raise the respectability of the novel genre, but also to provide a possible answer to the crisis of values that was threatening the very foundations of the political and social order.


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