Gótico brasileño: el cine de Walter Hugo Khouri y José Mojica Marins

This paper seeks to connect the concepts of “terror” and “horror” proposed by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe to films by Brazilian directors Walter Hugo Khouri and José Mojica Marins. It will be discussed here how such concepts manifest themselves in the national context and in which senses, trapped somewhere between repetition and difference, Khouri and Mojica’s films can be deemed expressions of a Brazilian Gothic. Stemming from elements derived from Anglo-American criticism, but, highlighting the different meanings that these elements gain in Brazil. To interpret Brazilian films in the light of the Gothic means addressing the issue of “construction of meaning” in national history, as the Gothic has the potential to revive old traumas and generate discussions about specific social contexts.

Dangers, Delights, Development: Female Travel in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Turkish Embassy Letters

This paper examines the portrayal of travel for women in two eighteenth-century literary texts by women writers: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. With a focus on the mental, emotional, and psychological effects of female travel that each author depicts, it analyzes both the dramatic dangers and pleasures faced by Radcliffe’s Gothic heroine and the more mild, cerebral ones experienced by the historical Montagu. Drawing on the work of Marianna D’Ezio, Adam Watkins, and Mary Jo Kietzman, it argues that both Radcliffe and Montagu ultimately endorsed the idea of travel for women through their work, portraying the pleasure, experience, and self-cultivation it afforded as outweighing its dangers. Finally, it posits that this position resisted both Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of appropriate female behaviours and desires by encouraging women readers to experience the world outside of the domestic sphere.

Young Jane Austen and the Circulation-Library Novel

Although William Lane only began publishing under the Minerva imprint in 1790, by the end of that decade he had—thanks to his ongoing publication of gothic romances written in imitation of Ann Radcliffe, his recruitment of unknown women authors, and his innovative marketing strategies—eclipsed the competition. Before the Minerva era began, however, one of Lane’s major competitors in the field of circulation-library formula fiction, Thomas Hookham, published several novels that were important to Jane Austen’s juvenilia, including the three this essay focuses on: Ann Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and two by Eliza Nugent Bromley, Laura and Augustus (1784) and The History of Sir Charles Bentinck and Louisa Cavendish (178/1789?). In addition, because advertisements, catalogues, and other reading lists were important to readers and self-fashioning important to the aspiring young author, besides these primary texts I also consider associated paratexts. These include titles and dedications in Austen’s case and, in Hookham’s case, a list of “Books Printed by T. Hookham,” which appears inside Athlin and Dunbayne immediately following the title page, where any reader must notice it. Although we cannot know for sure, it is possible that this particular list directly influenced Austen’s (and the Austen family’s) choice of reading material in 1789 as well as Austen’s subsequent choice of satiric targets for “Love and Freindship.” In any case, the very possibility that she paid such close attention to Hookham’s list of “Books Printed” prompts a careful consideration of what the juvenilia may reveal about her reading process, her youthful understanding of circulation-library publishers’ marketing strategies and materials, and her response to the model of authorship they promoted. Taken together, these texts and paratexts strongly suggest that the teenaged Austen appreciated the practical use of lists like the one found in “Books Printed” and made good use of them as a reader who was committed to mastering generic conventions, but that she also parodied their rhetoric in her own titles and dedications; they suggest, moreover, that she appreciated the pleasurable recognition of the familiar enjoyed by readers of circulation-library publisher’s formulaic fiction but was skeptical about certain aspects of the reading and writing networks that such publishers’ marketing strategies were designed to produce. After all, one of the targets of her satire in “Love and Freindship” is quixotic young ladies who, like this epistolary novel’s narrator Laura, set out on the road of literary imitation and end up both disappointing and disappointed.

The Gothic Element in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

The paper attempts to analyse the gothic element in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The paper presents the study in the essay form and it begins with a presentation of the gothic romance and its significance, characteristics and nature as a genre and in the novel of this study. The paper points out the types of the gothic school for Radcliffe is a representative of the school of terror while Lewis the school of horror. The study concentrates on Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as a gothic romance which narrates the story of Emily St. Aubert, and Valencourt, who faced a thousand obstacles, and perils thrown in their way. The heroine finds herself separated from the man she loves, and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her. The study ends with a conclusion that states the main ideas in the study. Key words: Gothic element, Gothic Romamce, Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, terror, horror

Ann Radcliffe’s Classical Remembrances

This chapter examines the role of classical literature in the life and writings of Ann Radcliffe. A strong case can be made for Radcliffe’s awareness of, and interest in, classical literature, even if it is impossible to claim decisively that she could read Latin. First, it examines allusions to Greek and Roman antiquity in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). These allusions are used to articulate an ethical sensibility for these novels’ heroines: they are susceptible to the grandeur and sublimity of the classical world, and yet direct their attention and sympathy not to heroes or leaders but to the innocent victims of grand ambition. The second part of the chapter examines Radcliffe’s work of travel literature. In this work, the Roman historian Tacitus is quoted in Latin three times, in each case to describe the traces of war and suffering in the places that Radcliffe and her husband visit. Finally, the chapter turns to Radcliffe’s final novel published in her lifetime, The Italian (1797), in which the eroticism of Herculaneum wall paintings, and the shadowy walls of a Roman fort are sources of terror for the novel’s heroine and hero.

Spectres of Antiquity

Gothic literature imagines the return of ghosts from the past. What about the classical past? Spectres of Antiquity is the first full-length study describing the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and the Gothic novels, poetry, and drama of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. Rather than simply representing the opposite of classical aesthetics and ideas, the Gothic emerged from an awareness of the lingering power of antiquity, and it irreverently fractures and deconstructs classical images and ideas. The Gothic also reflects a new vision of the ancient world: no longer inspiring modernity through its examples, antiquity has become a ghost, haunting and oppressing contemporary minds rather than guiding them. Through readings of canonical works by authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Shelley, Spectres of Antiquity argues that these authors’ ghostly plots and ideas preserve the remembered traces of Greece and Rome. In comprehensive detail, Spectres of Antiquity rewrites the history of the Gothic, demonstrating that the genre was haunted by a far deeper sense of history than readers had previously assumed.