scholarly journals Urban girl: writing the female gothic in the Australian landscape

TEXT ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret McVeigh
Keyword(s):  
Female Gothic ◽  
Urban Girl

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.

Queering the Female Gothic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ardel Haefele-Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Vernon Lee ◽  
Female Gothic ◽  
Florence Marryat ◽  
And Gender

Queering the Female Gothic’ examines work by women writers from the 1890s onwards who use the Gothic to create covert and/or overt queer situations and characters. These are often used to explore cultural and social concerns, such as restrictive patriarchal and hetero-normative family structures, the medical pathologisation of female and genderqueer bodies, institutions of racism and sexism within colonial and slave narratives, and contemporary issues surrounding the intersections of sexuality, race, class and gender identity. The chapter examines the work of a number of American and British women authors who have employed the Gothic as a proverbial safe space in which to explore these concerns; they include Vernon Lee, Florence Marryat, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Jane Chambers, Jewelle Gomez, Sarah Waters, Yvonne Heidt and Cate Culpepper. Not only do their fictions encompass queer characters and scenarios in terms of gender identities outside of the male/female binary and the full spectrum of queer sexual orientation, but the authors themselves, taken as a group, embody the full spectrum as far as gender identity and sexual orientation are concerned.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avril Horner ◽  
Sue Zlosnik
Keyword(s):  
Female Gothic ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
Second Wave

Since the early debates about ‘Female Gothic’ in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by Second-Wave Feminism, the theorisation of gender has become increasingly sophisticated and has resulted in a long interrogation of the category ‘woman’. There was, however, a political price to pay for this, in so far as feminism gave way to the problematics of post-feminism, now itself being interrogated by a younger generation of women. The contributors in this volume tackle such conundrums in lively chapters that explore Gothic works – from established classics to recent films and novels – from feminist and/or post-feminist perspectives. The result is a book that combines rigorous close readings with elegant use of theory in order to question some ingrained assumptions about women, the Gothic and identity....

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