Search Results (11)

Bridging the horrors of the Black American experience with the literary legacies of the postfeminist Gothic, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country comments on the deformation of time and space for Black women. Reflecting the historic preoccupation of the Gothic with the social anxieties of gender and sexuality, many of Lovecraft Country’s chapters center on economically or socially mobile Black women and respond to the contemporary conditions of the postfeminist Gothic and intersectional discourses of race, class, and gender. In the end, Lovecraft Country signals White patriarchal colonial geography as weird and represents its Black women characters as figuratively undead modern subjects due to intersectional oppression. Full article

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale. Full article

This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these texts, Blackness acts as an emotional and material resource for White characters that perversely bolsters Whiteness by escaping it. Little-known outside of antebellum specialisms, Sheppard Lee enhances our understanding of race in the Gothic by considering why Whiteness may be rejected in the early nation. Written in the context of blackface minstrelsy, the novel transforms downwardly mobile Sheppard into an enslaved man as a respite from the pressures of economic success. Get Out builds on its nineteenth-century precursors by showing the Black body as a desired and necessary vessel for the “post-racial” White American self, who swaps their physical Whiteness for Blackness to extend or enhance their own life, turning Black men into extensions and enforcers of White middle-class culture. In uniting these texts through the lens of critical Whiteness studies, this article argues that White racial transformation is a long-held tradition in the US Gothic that not only expresses White desires and anxieties, but itself transforms in each specific historical racial context. Full article

African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns. Full article

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCosta’s film establishes a transformative relationship with its predecessor. In the 2021 film, Candyman rewrites the story of the original, disrupts its stereotypical representation of Blackness, and appropriates the horror genre to give voice to the peculiar anxieties of contemporary African American life. In so doing, DaCosta’s film also challenges classic gothic tropes of horrific Blackness while at the same time pushing back against dominant narratives on race to reclaim space for a discussion on racial relations in America filtered through a Black lens. Full article

Music videos of the MTV era often use gothic visual signifiers as decorative elements or creative expressions of the musician’s star persona or latest record. But several video clips from the early 1980s adapt the figure of gothic monstrosity, and in particular, the images and stories of the undead or beastly Other, in ways that dramatize the music video’s evolving aesthetic, commercial, and technological character and its unpredictable relation to Gothic. In this article, I look closely at the narrative elements of two important configurations of gothic-themed video clips: “Don’t Go” (1982) by Yazoo, “Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)” (1983) by Sheena Easton, and “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” (1993) by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which creatively adapt textual elements of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and its various film adaptations and parodies and its cultural significance in the modern Western imaginary; and “Thriller” (1983) by Michael Jackson and “Heads Will Roll” (2009) by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which likewise adapt and reimagine aspects of John Landis’s 1981 horror comedy film An American Werewolf in London and its afterlife in the modern media ecosystem. These videos, I argue, trouble conventional understandings of the practice of adaptation as a one-to-one line of inheritance between source material and destination text. In so doing, furthermore, these clips amplify and elaborate certain socio-cultural anxieties about gender and race, personal and professional identity and autonomy, and technological innovation and automation that animate their source materials. Full article

The gothic genre in Latin American literature has been the object of fashionable interest in recent decades and seems to absorb all the elements of the politically correct agenda; however, in the current trend of absolute presentism that seems regular in the critics, it is not taken into account that there exists a previous tradition more or less connected with its European sources but in search of its own cultural character. I would like to comment on some specifically gothic novels published in Argentina between the 1980s and the 1990s, as well as a recent one by the prolific writer César Aira. Prins can be analyzed as an ambiguous culmination of the gothic tendency, as well as a symptom of the disorientation of a genre that threatens to become a label as broad as it is empty. Full article

This article examines two neo-Victorian novels by American writers—Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) and Elaine Bergstrom’s Blood to Blood (2000)—which “write back” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), respectively. Both novels ostensibly critique the socio-cultural inequalities of Victorian London, particularly for women, immigrants, and the working class, and the gender and class politics and structures of the original texts. However, as this article demonstrates, the presence of invented Irish female servants as key figures in these “re-visionary” narratives also undermines some aspects of this critique. Despite acting as gothic heroines, figures who traditionally uncover patriarchal abuses, these servant characters also facilitate their employers’ lives and negotiations of the supernatural (with varying degrees of success), while also themselves becoming associated with gothic monstrosity, via their extended associations with Irish-Catholic violence and barbarity on both sides of the Atlantic. This article therefore argues that Irish servant figures in neo-Victorian texts by American writers function as complex signifiers of pastness and barbarity, but also of assimilation and progressive modernization. Indeed, the more “Irish” the servant, the better equipped she will be to help her employer navigate the world of the supernatural. Full article

This essay offers a first critical reading of American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s short story “The Warlock’s Shadow” (1886), asserting that the tale appropriates historical traumas in order to navigate, and transgress, boundaries of genre and gender. The strangeness of the text’s Central Californian setting, to the narrator, precipitates a series of Gothic metamorphoses, and “The Warlock’s Shadow” engages with this transformation via a concept that this essay defines as the “Californian Uncanny”. The latter framework is a result of the specific, layered indigenous and colonial identities of post-Gold Rush California coming into contact with the unstable subjectivities of the Gothic genre. “The Warlock’s Shadow” manifests the Californian Uncanny primarily through the relationship between the home, the environment, and the “unassimilable” inhabitant. Stevenson’s text illustrates, through these images, the ways in which late-nineteenth-century American Gothic fiction has allowed the white feminine subject to negotiate her own identity, complicating the binary distinctions between Self and Other which underpin American colonialism both internally and externally. The phenomenon of the Californian Uncanny in “The Warlock’s Shadow” reflects these gendered and geographical anxieties of American identity, confronting the ghosts of the nation’s westernmost region. Full article

In this essay, I discuss Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 feature film mother! in the context of an intersectional approach to ecofeminism and the American gothic genre. By exploring the histories of ecofeminism, the significances of the ecogothic, and the Puritan origins of American gothic fiction, I read the movie as a reiteration of both a global ecophobic and an American national narrative, whose biblical symbolism is rooted in the patriarchal logic of Christian theology, American history, female suffering, and environmental crisis. mother! emerges as an example of a distinctly American ecofeminist gothic through its focus on and subversion of the essentialist equation of women and nature as feminized others, by dipping into the archives of feminist literary criticism, and by raising ecocritical awareness of the dangers of climate change across socio-cultural and anthropocentric categories. Situating Aronofsky’s film within traditions of American gothic and ecofeminist literatures from colonial times to the present moment, I show how mother! moves beyond a maternalist fantasy rooted in the past and towards a critique of the androcentric ideologies at the core of the 21st-century Anthropocene. Full article

This article focuses on Richard Ford’s short story “Calling,” collected in the volume entitled A Multitude of Sins (2001). It consists of the detailed recalling by a first-person narrator, from the vantage point of adulthood, of a duck-hunting outing with his father at a moment of acute family crisis when he was still a teenager. This episode, redolent of America’s nostalgic motif of male bonding and father-son transmission in the midst of mythical American nature, is shown to have proved a pathetic failure at the time, and the story stages—to pick up Svetlana Boym’s famous distinction between two main types of nostalgia—the enlightening “reflective” effects of recalling this moment of “restorative” longing for the protagonist. However, the highly analytical narrator does not consciously dwell upon the peripheral yet disturbing presence of two grotesque characters that, I contend, are the locus of the implicit meaning of the text. Through precise textual reading and references to Southern Gothic, I indeed argue that the subtext of “Calling” invites the reader to journey back into a region’s (the South’s) troubled collective past and to question its own relation to nostalgia. “Calling” thus also stages the ambivalence of nostalgic longing on the collective plane as it shows willful nostalgic recollection wavering in the face of the return of the historical repressed, that of America’s ineffable original sin. Full article