Abstract
The famous 1974 assertion by Angela Carter (1940–92) that ‘we live in Gothic times’ seems to carry even more force now as the appetite for Gothic stories and style in popular culture continues unabated and Gothic studies are firmly embedded in many university departments.1 For some critics it is not surprising that the twentieth-century accumulation of wars and violence offers an inspiration for and a reinforcement of ‘an age in which a Gothic aesthetic flourishes’.2 ‘Gothic’ has proved to be a slippery term, however. Long regarded as denoting a historically defined genre confined to the latter part of the eighteenth century and early decades of the nineteenth, Gothic began to be understood, from David Punter’s ground-breaking work in 1980 onwards, as a mode of expression enduring into the present day.3 It is now widely accepted that Gothic adapts its forms according to cultural context. It can also be argued that even the Gothic sensibility (its preoccupation with ‘horror, madness, monstrosity, death, disease, terror, evil, and weird sexuality’) is inflected differently in different texts and performances so that its tendency to excess becomes on occasion the stuff of comedy rather than terror.4 Characterized above all by transgression and an ambiguous relationship with everyday reality, Gothic shifts according to recognized social boundaries.
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Notes
Angela Carter, ‘Afterword’, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974; London: Quartet Books, 1976), p. 122.
Lucie Armitt, Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), p. 81.
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980).
See Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath, Introduction to The New Gothic (New York: Random House, 1991), p. xiv.
On comedy, see Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
David Richter, The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), p. 2.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), Ch. 5.
Helene Meyers, Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
See Patricia Duncker, ‘Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela Carter’s Bloody Chambers’, Literature and History, 10:1 (1984), pp. 3–14.
See Laura Mulvey’s influential essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3 (1975), pp. 6–18.
Daphne du Maurier, ‘Don’t Look Now’, Not After Midnight (London: Gollancz, 1971).
For a detailed reading of this story, see Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1995), p. 6.
Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (London: Vintage, 1983), p. 18.
Anne Quéma makes this point in ‘Family and Symbolic Violence in The Mist in the Mirror’, Gothic Studies, 8:2 (2006), p. 125.
See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 336–71 for an influential reading of Jane Eyre in these terms.
Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), pp. 179–205.
Matthew Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. George WE. Russell (London: Macmillan, 1896), Vol. 1, p. 34. Cited in Gilbert and Gubar, p. 337.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.
See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1990) and
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), p. 379, p. 387.
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 30.
Ali Smith, Hotel World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 235.
For a discussion of intertextuality in the novel in relation to literary reworkings of the Oedipal narrative see Anne Quéma, ‘The Political Uncanny of the Family: Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between and The Civil Partnership Act’, Gothic Kinship, ed. Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik (Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 132–56.
See Alison Rudd, Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010) and
Glennis Byron, ed., Global Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2013).
Pauline Melville, ‘You Left the Door Open’, Shape-shifter (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), pp. 148–75.
Pauline Melville, The Migration of Ghosts (London: Bloomsbury 1998), p. 24.
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Zlosnik, S. (2015). The Gothic: Danger, Discontent, and Desire. In: Eagleton, M., Parker, E. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970-Present. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-29481-4_10
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