Abstract
The Conclusion looks beyond the end of the book’s historical arc to the future of horror fiction and its increasingly deft, unapologetic use of the corpse as a source of Gothic thrills. Shapira first examines dead bodies in the deliberately shocking short stories published in the early nineteenth century in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: the stories, she shows, are already a streamlined narrative device aiming to maximize the impact of gruesome imagery. To complete her argument, Shapira turns to one of the Gothic corpse’s iconic late twentieth-century incarnations in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), where the portrayal of human remains no longer offers even the pretense of a purpose beyond the excitement of the reader and appears, moreover, in what has by now become a self-evident form of entertainment.
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Notes
- 1.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 32.
- 2.
John Wilson, “Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary,” in Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine ed. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 21. Published anonymously in the August 1818 issue.
- 3.
The prefatory comments attributing the story to Gosschen’s so-called memoirs are not included in Morrison and Baldick’s edition; see Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. III (April–September 1818), 486. Available online through www.hathitrust.org.
- 4.
Wilson never published any more “extracts” from the so-called memoirs; see Morrison and Baldick’s note on the story, Tales of Terror, 286.
- 5.
Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick , Introduction to Tales of Terror, xiii; Harvey Peter Sucksmith , “The Secret of Immediacy: Dickens’ Debt to the Tale of Terror in Blackwood’s,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26.2 (1971): 145–57.
- 6.
Morrison and Baldick , Introduction, xi, xiii.
- 7.
Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, “‘A Character So Various, and Yet So Indisputably Its Own’: A Passage to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,” in Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’, ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 6.
- 8.
According to Morrison , “in Blackwood’s first year alone [Wilson] published three powerful stories that helped largely to introduce the tale of terror as a fictional form, and that set the trend for the horror fiction published in the magazine over the next several decades.” “Blackwood’s Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity,” Romanticism on the Net no. 20 (2000), para. 11. https://doi.org/10.7202/005951ar.
- 9.
Wilson, “Extracts from Gosschen’s Diary,” 20.
- 10.
Daniel Keyte Sandford, “A Night in the Catacombs,” in Morrison and Baldick, Tales of Terror, 26.
- 11.
Ibid., 27.
- 12.
Ibid., 28.
- 13.
Ibid., 28, 29.
- 14.
Ibid., 31–2.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
John Scott, A Visit to Paris in 1814…. 3rd ed. (London, 1815), 336. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=Eh5EAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR1.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Sandford, “Night in the Catacombs,” 31.
- 19.
Scott, Visit to Paris, 334, 338.
- 20.
Sandford, “Night in the Catacombs,” 28.
- 21.
Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 127.
- 22.
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 160.
- 23.
Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 24.
Gamer makes this claim about Romantic writers, whose self-opposition to the Gothic, “constituted … as a conspicuously ‘low’ genre,” was “a complex and ultimately conflicted and duplicitous endeavor,” while William Warner sees the same dynamic as typical of the tensions between types of novels: “However much authors or critics labor to make it a definable literary type, the novel cannot be fixed as literary because it sustains its status as a form of entertainment and continues to feel the deforming tug of media culture.” Gamer , Romanticism and the Gothic, 7; Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 289.
- 25.
E. J. Clery , The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137.
- 26.
Stephen King, The Shining (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 248. Kindle Edition.
- 27.
Ibid., 319–20.
- 28.
Ibid., 133.
- 29.
See, for example, Linda Badley’s chapter on King in Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice (Westport: Greenwood, 1996).
- 30.
Maria Tatar discusses the tale’s history while noting King’s engagement with it in Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
- 31.
According to a 2000 piece in The New York Times Magazine, King’s “complaints are by now familiar: the literary establishment has long misunderstood popular fiction, and just because he sells millions of books, serious readers won’t take him seriously.” Stephen J. Dubner, “What is Stephen King Trying to Prove?” The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/13/magazine/what-is-stephen-king-trying-to-prove.html.
- 32.
King, The Shining, 245.
- 33.
Ibid., 248.
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Shapira, Y. (2018). Conclusion: Remains to Be Seen. In: Inventing the Gothic Corpse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76484-9_6
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