Gothic forms of feminine fictions

Gothic forms of feminine fictions
Author: Susanne Becker
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526125374

Gothic forms of feminine fictions is a study of the powers of the Gothic in late twentieth-century fiction and film. Susanne Becker argues that the Gothic, two hundred years after it emerged, exhibits renewed vitality in our media age with its obsession for stimulation and excitement.

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction
Author: K. Cooper
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2012-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137283386

From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

American Horror Fiction and Class

American Horror Fiction and Class
Author: David Simmons
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137532807

In this book, Simmons argues that class, as much as race and gender, played a significant role in the development of Gothic and Horror fiction in a national context. From the classic texts of Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne right through to contemporary examples, such as the novels of Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series, class remains an ever present though understudied element. This study will appeal to scholars of American Studies, English literature, Media and Cultural Studies interested in class representations in the horror genre from the nineteenth century to the present day.

The Contested Castle

The Contested Castle
Author: Kate Ferguson Ellis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1989
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780252060489

The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years
Author: Annette R. Federico
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2011-01-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826272096

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia. These contributions represent both the diversity of today’s feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back—with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments—to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work. The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman’s impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book’s suppressed foremothers. In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women’s writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.

Women and the Gothic

Women and the Gothic
Author: Avril Horner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2016-02-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474409512

A re-assessment of the Gothic in relation to the female, the 'feminine', feminism and post-feminismThis collection of newly commissioned essays brings together major scholars in the field of Gothic studies in order to re-think the topic of 'Women and the Gothic'. The 14 chapters in this volume engage with debates about 'Female Gothic' from the 1970s and '80s, through second wave feminism, theorisations of gender and a long interrogation of the 'women' category as well as with the problematics of post-feminism, now itself being interrogated by a younger generation of women. The contributors explore Gothic works from established classics to recent films and novels from feminist and post-feminist perspectives. The result is a lively book that combines rigorous close readings with elegant use of theory in order to question some ingrained assumptions about women, the Gothic and identity.Key FeaturesRevitalises the long-running debate about women, the Gothic and identityEngages with the political agendas of feminism and post-feminismPrioritises the concerns of woman as reader, author and criticOffers fresh readings of both classic and recent Gothic works

Modern Gothic

Modern Gothic
Author: Victor Sage
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780719042089

This lively collection of essays aims to chart the survival of the gothic strain - the dark, the forbidding, the alienated, the fantastic - in a spectrum of popular and 'high cultural' forms of representation.

The Female Gothic

The Female Gothic
Author: Juliann E. Fleenor
Publisher: Eden Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1983
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

The Female Gothic

The Female Gothic
Author: D. Wallace
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2009-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230245455

This rich and varied collection of essays makes a timely contribution to critical debates about the Female Gothic, a popular but contested area of literary studies. The contributors revisit key Gothic themes - gender, race, the body, monstrosity, metaphor, motherhood and nationality - to open up new critical directions.

Law, Sensibility, and the Sublime in Eighteenth-century Women's Fiction

Law, Sensibility, and the Sublime in Eighteenth-century Women's Fiction
Author: Susan Chaplin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2004
Genre: Law
ISBN:

This work offers, firstly, a fresh historical, philosophical and cultural interpretation of the relation between the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility, the sublime, and the theory and practice of eighteenth-century law. Secondly, the work exposes and explores the influence of this combination of discourses upon the formation of gender identities in this period. The author argues that it is only through a study of the convergence of these key eighteenth-century discourses that changing conceptualisations of femininity can fully be understood. Thirdly, it examines the presence, within eighteenth-century fiction by women, of a new female subject. Novels by women in this period, Chaplin posits, begin to reveal that the female subject position constructed through the discourses of law, sensibility and the sublime gives rise, for women, to a feminine ontological crisis that may be seen to anticipate by two hundred years the trauma of the 'post modern' male subject unable to present a unified subjectivity to himself or to the world. This feminine crisis finds expression within a range of female fiction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century - in Charlotte Lennox's anti-romance satire, Frances Sheridan's 'conduct-book' novels, the Gothic romances of Radcliffe and Eliza Fenwick and the sensationalistic horror fiction of Charlotte Dacre. Concentrating upon these writers, Chaplin argues that their works 'speak of dread' on behalf of women in this period and to varying degrees challenge discourses that construct femininity as a highly unstable, barely tenable subject position. Combining the works of Lyotard and Irigaray to formulate a new feminist reading of the eighteenth-century discourse of the sublime, this study offers fresh insights into the culture and politics of the eighteenth century. It presents highly original readings of well-known and lesser-known literary texts that interrogate from fresh perspectives the complex theoretical issues pertaining to