The Gothic Galaxy:
Intersections and Metamorphoses
Dipartimento LILEC
Università di Bologna
15-16 September 2016
Abstracts
Silvia Albertazzi (Università di Bologna), Retaggi gotici in “Shame” di
Salman Rushdie
The aim of my paper is to show how, in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame,
Rushdie’s “shifting postmodern quest for figure” (Nicholls) allows him
to tackle and re-invent Gothic elements to illustrate two of his main
concerns: the “national longing for form” (Brennan) and the concept of
translation and migration. Using Gothic as a “shadow genre” and taking
advantage of his very own doubleness of articulation, Rushdie recreates
the genesis and the history of Pakistan as a “black” fairytale, where
almost all the main components of Gothic fiction can be detected. The
result is a critique of Pakistani politics, which parodies the style of
sacred texts, in general, and the Quran, in particular, while being imbued
with English literary points of reference.
Gioia Angeletti (Università di Parma), Nineteenth-century Revenants:
James Hogg and the Scottish Hypertextual Novel
This paper aims to investigate the literary impact that Hogg’s magnus
opus had on two contemporary Scottish novelists, Emma Tennant and
James Robertson – an influence which contributes to the consolidation of
a typically Scottish Gothic mode from the Romantic period to nowadays.
In particular, starting from the assumption that The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner is an early example of the innumerable
meanings and hermeneutic complexity of Gothic fiction, the paper
intends to show how Tennant and Robertson, in various degrees of
intertextuality, have appropriated its genre multiplicity. The focus of
analysis will be on three hypertextual novels: Emma Tennant’s
reworking of the Hoggian hypotext in her 1978 novel The Bad Sister, a
gothic noir that ‘translates’ the original story into contemporary
Scotland, giving it a decidedly feminist twist; and James Robertson’s
The Fanatic (2000) and The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006)., whose
pages are pervasively haunted by both nineteenth-century antecedents in
their gallimaufry of realistic and oneiric dimensions, and down-to-earth
and extraordinary characters, all inevitably confronted with their own
past and their multilayered identities. In the concluding part of my paper,
in order to reinforce my argument about the inexhaustible potential of
the Gothic in the postmodern era, I will refer to another example of
contemporary appropriation of Scottish classics, that is, Tennant’s
reprise of R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
in her explicitly feminist novel Two Women of London: The Strange
Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde (1989).
Maurizio Ascari (Università di Bologna), Light into darkness: the Gothic
Roots of Psycho-thrillers
Despite the fascination it exerts on readers and on the cinema public, the
psycho-thriller is sadly under-theorised as a subgenre of crime fiction,
perhaps because of its complex identity, which escapes easy
classification. The fortune of psycho-thrillers rests on their hybrid nature,
combining the scientific approach of psychoanalysis with the shady
labyrinths of Gothic minds and settings. The development of the psychothriller has arguably escaped closer critical scrutiny also because of its
transmedia quality, at the crossroads between literature and cinema, as
shown by the impact Hitchcock’s films had on the rise of this sub-genre.
My paper will focus on two early psycho-thrillers that are mainly
remembered because Hitchcock adapted them for the cinema. The first is
Francis Beeding’s The House of Dr. Edwardes (1928), whose real
authors are John Palmer and Hilary A. Saunders and which provided the
basis for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). The other is Robert Bloch’s
Psycho (1959), which was turned into a film in 1960. Both these novels
‘refunctionalize’ narrative and thematic conventions that clearly belong
to the Gothic tradition, ranging from the ambivalences of first-person
narratives, the terrific/horrific connotations of Gothic settings that are
charged with symbolic meanings and mirror the protagonist’s inner
imbalance, and lastly a revival of the occult as a key to understanding an
aberrant psyche. It is thanks to the appeal of these and other Gothic traits
that the psycho-thriller asserted itself as a global phenomenon.
Serena Baiesi (Università di Bologna), Intersections and Metamorphoses
of the Gothic Genre from Clara Reeve to Ann Radcliffe
Published in 1785, Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance offers one of
the first histories of prose fiction and the first straightforward attempt to
elevate romance to the status of serious literature. She acknowledges that
romances “may not improperly be called the polite literature of early
ages” and “have been the favourite amusements of later times”. Though
diverse in content, romances traditionally dealt with the marvellous,
while novels represented the manners and speech of contemporary
societies and, above all, examined characters’ psychological truths. As
Walpole stated in his second preface to The Castle of Otranto, the fusion
of romance and novel generated a new form of romance in which
characters possessed believable psychosocial traits while still
investigating the region of the marvellous. This attempt to depict deep
emotional insights is apparent across genres, since all emphasize the
importance of tracing casualty and excavating social manners and
behavioural idiosyncrasies in order to reveal what Charlotte Dacre calls
the ‘actuating principle’ [Zofloya, 1806].
Gothic literature during the Romantic period dealt with the unresolved
argument between rationality and the more suggestible and mysterious
states of mind, and sought to undermine, manipulate, and critique the
logic of Enlightenment rationalism. In “On the Pleasure Derived from
Objects of Terrors” (1773), Anna Laetitia Barbauld describes gothic
fiction as the narrative which “awakens the mind, and keeps it on the
stretch”, while “our imagination, […] rejoices in the expansion of its
powers.” It was nonetheless Ann Radcliffe who first announced a new
age of Gothic romance, placing mystery at the centre of its thematic,
rhetorical, and moral projection in her essay entitled On the Supernatural
in Poetry (c. 1802). Here, Radcliffe distinguishes terror from horror,
stating that whereas terror enlarges readers’ minds by requiring them to
imaginatively participate in the narrative’s evocation of fear and
trepidation, horror’s explicitly violent episodes leave no room for the
imagination to operate, thus restricting readers’ faculties. Radcliffe’s
aesthetic of terror presents a unique approach to the gothic built on
suspense, a narrative technique that allows the expansion of the mind
and increases the faculty of imagination.
In this paper, I will present some of these theoretical approaches to the
gothic, exploring how Reeve, Walpole, Dacre, Barbauld and Radcliffe
deploy the meanings of the gothic with the aim to identify its aesthetic
principles.
Mirella Billi (Università della Tuscia a Viterbo), The Unkown and the
Alien: Gothic Terror and Horror in Contemporary Cinema
The paper will concentrate on Alien, the first film directed by Ridley
Scott in 1979 with this title. Though included in – and actually in many
ways belonging to – the science fiction film genre ( as set in a spaceship
travelling in space in 2122), Alien is a formidable concentration and
transformation of originary Gothic elements, motives, and functions, reinterpreted and recreated, also with multple references to past and
present works, and to their interpretations in time, in an even more
suggestive atmosphere of heightened terrors and horrors .
Alessandra Calanchi (University of Urbino Carlo Bo), Alien Gothic and
Gothic Aliens: Leigh Brackett’s “respectful distance”
I offer you these legends of Old Mars as true tales,
inviting all dreary realities to keep a respectful distance.
(Leigh Brackett)
Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) is an icon for pop fiction fandom, though an
almost perfect stranger for the academia. Best known as the Queen of the
space opera, she is the author of many novels set on planets other than
Earth, but she wrote good hard-boiled fiction and screenplays for the
cinema too.
In my talk I shall focus on Brackett’s representation of alien worlds
and interstellar travellers in order to show how she reinterpreted Gothic
in a very personal way by making it revive in the outer space and deal
with extraterrestrial alienness. Such a revival is far from being a unique
case (see Robert Howard, or Edgar Rice Burroughs) but contains an
extraordinary, explicit tension between truth and reality, the former
being preferred to the latter insomuch as it stems from the over-abundant
imagination and visionary power of the writer.
Brackett, in fact, by keeping a distance from “dreary realities” and by
legitimizing the “legends” as “true”, actually chooses Gothic excess,
transgression, gloom, horror, and terror in order to speak of gender, race,
and the effects of colonization, thus creating a bridge that connects the
past to our present times.
Mariaconcetta Costantini (Università G. d’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara),
Gothic Whiteness: Polar Images of Terror in Victorian and Neo-Victorian
Literature
My paper explores the development of polar imagery in Victorian and
neo-Victorian literature. The nineteenth century witnessed the transition
from Romantic spiritualism to Victorian realism, which is suggested by
the symbolic reconfiguration of polar space and travelling. Emblematic,
in this regard, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose setting and
characterization reveal an epistemic shift from sublime terror to psychic
perturbation. Towards the middle of the century, literary interest in
(Ant)Arctic regions was more strongly aroused by expeditions to the
extreme North/South. Through a genre-crossing of mimesis and the
Gothic, narratives composed at the time turn the immense whiteness of
the poles into a generator of disquieting meanings. A case in point is the
elaborate troping of the “frozen deep” in Wilkie Collins and Charles
Dickens’s eponymous play. Psychologically disturbing, The Frozen
Deep proves to be philosophically ‘modern’ in light of Kristeva’s and
Blumenberg’s theories, which unveil some disturbing fantasies of
abjection at the core of the play. Neo-Victorianism has inherited this
tendency to Gothicize polar whiteness. In reimagining the challenges
met by Victorian explores, twenty-first-century novelists still represent
the iced plains and seas of the (Ant)Arctic as uncanny places where
civilized beings make tragic experiences of degeneration. Well-known
and fully mapped though they are today, the poles nonetheless continue
to generate a variety of anxieties, which have anthropological,
psychological and existential explanations. The link between their hostile
whiteness and the fears they unleash (i.e., fears of violence, anarchy,
cannibalism) is evident in Dan Simmons’s The Terror (2007). A
fantastic reconstrution of the ill-fated expedition of John Franklin and
Francis Crozier, The Terror represents the Arctic as a deadly whiteness,
a Gothic place of impenetrable mysteries which cast a shadow on some
ideological foundations of Western philosophy, science and spirituality.
Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Università di Bologna), Horror and Terror,
Gender and Fear in Joanna Baillie’s ‘Orra’
Joanna Baillie’s play Orra, a tragedy focused on fear, was included in
the third collection of A Series of Plays on the Passions (1812). This
paper will argue that the play, while proposing a somehow parodic view
of the traditional gothic genre – putting into question its theoretical
principles – also dramatizes the psychological truth of gothic in
revealing the progressive decline of the will and the rise of mental
disorder of the young protagonist, Orra. The consequences for the latter
in attempting to exercise her right to freedom, and in challenging the
laws of the patriarchal order in which she lives, are as tragic as they are
gender biased. Baillie skillfully stages the psychological and physical
reactions of the heroine, while she is victimized by the intrigues of the
villain who segregates and terrifies her. In the meantime the
playwright gives her spectators unique insight into the inconsistencies
that separate but also superimpose the two aesthetic categories theorized
by Ann Radcliffe, namely horror and terror.
Keir Elam (Università di Bologna), ‘The model I copied’: Shakespeare
and the Genesis of Gothic
In his preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, Horace
Walpole confesses “That great master of nature, Shakspeare, was the
model I copied.” What it means, in the context of the nascent gothic
novel, to “copy” Shakespeare – or indeed, what it means to adopt
Shakespeare as a “model” – Walpole does not specify. This paper aims
to investigate the Shakespearian affiliations of early gothic fiction. It also
discusses Shakespeare’s own dramatization of the ‘gothic’ in plays such
as Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and Macbeth: a dramatization that has a
cultural fallout not only in the novel but also in late eighteenth-century
neo-gothic architecture, beginning with Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill
and its allusive Shakespearian scenography.
Laura Falqui e Raffaele Milani (Università di Bologna), Notte oscura e
notte luminosa. La pittura inglese, tra sublime e tardo-Romanticismo
La notte viene assunta a simbolo di un’apertura meditativa, attraversata
dai raggi del Sogno e della malinconia lunare, nell’incubo, nel poema
stellare, nelle visioni.
La pittura accoglie l’atmosfera della tenebra notturna e del sentimento
attraversando i grandi temi del Pittoresco, del Neo-Gotico, del Sublime
cui si associa il fantastico feerico di natura shakesperiana in vedute
intrise di “spirito inglese”, di stampo vittoriano, che fonde il gusto della
letteratura e il gusto della pittura.
Accanto alla notte oscura, si apre una sorta di via parallela all’incubo
e all’apocalisse, un vero e proprio solco lucente, che passa da Samuel
Palmer a Edward Burne-Jones coi tardo-preraffaelliti.
Carlotta Farese (Università di Bologna), Vernon Lee and the Renaissance
as Gothic at the Fin-de-siècle
The aim of the paper is to explore the representation of Italy, in
particular Renaissance Italy, in Vernon Lee’s fantastic tales, with a
specific focus on texts such as Amour Dure (1887) and A Wedding Chest
(1904). The paper will examine these short stories in the context of
Victorian descriptions of the Renaissance (Algernon Swinburne and
Walter Pater) and Lee’s own crtical essays (Euphorion, 1884;
Renaissance Fancies and Studies, 1895) discussing the ways in which
they reflect an extremely ambivalent relationship to the past (and in
particular the pagan past). Lee’s Renaissance implies a meta-historical
understanding of the gothic as the dimension where literary imagination,
engaging with the “spurious ghost” of the past, exposes the ultimate
fragility of the binary categories that structure the ordinary perception of
reality: self/other, male/female, nature/art, real/unreal.
Maurice Hindle (Open University), Byron to Buffy: The Shifting Dynamic
of Gender and its Agency in Vampire Tales Conveyed & Consumed in
Print, Film and Television
In this illustrated paper I seek to articulate and contextualise the way
gender and transgression have been presented in printed vampire texts
and (mainly) in more recent movie and TV texts.
I start with Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Le Fanu’s Carmilla
(1871-2) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) before moving into the film age.
Here I mention films where the controlling male vampire motif prevails,
such as Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931) before noting movies
where some gender complexity enters, as in film dramatizations of Le
Fanu’s lesbian-themed Carmilla: Hammer’s 1970 films The Vampire
Lovers and its sequel Lust for a Vampire, where the female ‘Mircalla’
figure becomes a conflicted bisexual, are perhaps representative.
I then briefly examine the significance of two 1992 feature films -Coppola’s Dracula and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer -before concentrating on Whedon’s hit American TV series of the same
name (1997-2003), my main topic.
Empowered female characters feature in all three titles, but only the
Buffy TV series allows the time (144 episodes) for the issues of
exorbitance of various kinds sexual desire, gender, authority, power -- to
be developed and explored in depth. It has been said that the supernatural
elements in the series stood ‘as metaphors for personal anxieties
associated with adolescence and young adulthood.’ The central character
Buffy is represented as aging from sixteen to 23 as we accompany the
story characters over their real-time seven-season/seven-year
experiential shifts in dealing with the outer/inner demonic challenges
presented during their passage from teenage adolescents to young adults.
I argue that this extended rite of emotional/experiential passage is one
that in our secular modern cultures never quite ends: ‘the supernatural’ in
one way or another still stands for a force that has to be reckoned with.
Michael Gamer (The University of Pennsylvania), Gothic Melodrama: An
Eldritch Tale of Origin
Many of us are familiar with the widely accepted critical narrative of
melodrama’s first appearance in England — via Thomas Holcroft’s A
Tale of Mystery: A Melo-drame (1802). This paper proposes at once an
earlier origin and a competing genealogy for this dramatic genre, one
based less in the narrative structure of melodramas than in the
manuscript and print record of English drama — that, and the
assumption that theatrical performance thrives especially on adaptation,
appropriation, and downright theft. While there will be no murder in this
gothic tale of lost origins, expect every other horror: powerpoint slides
without end, musical tracks played by automata, and, of course, either a
pitched battle or an explosion to end the performance.
Anthony Mandal (University of Cardiff), Fear and Loathing in the
Library: Anxious Textuality in Recent Gothic Fiction
‘Why, it’s them that, not content with printin’ lies on paper an’
preachin’ them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin’ them on the
tombstones.’—Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).
Throughout the history of the gothic, the textual space has been a
paradoxical one: revealing yet poisonous, alluring yet destructive, the
word (particularly, the printed word) is no longer a manifestation of the
providential Logos. Instead, textuality is disclosed in the gothic as a
contested concept, both the vessel of lost knowledge and the harbinger of
destruction: a problematised site in which anxieties of being are
consistently and insistently mapped out.
From the troubling manuscripts that Emily St Aubert misinterprets in
Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), through the slippery
volumes of M. R. James’s Edwardian ghost stories and H. P. Lovecraft’s
seductive, insanity-inducing necronomica of 1920s and ‘30s, to Umberto
Eco’s poisoned book in The Name of the Rose (1980), the gothic has
been haunted by the anxiety of the Text.
My paper considers more contemporaneous manifestations of such
bibliophobia by examining three recent gothic novels, in which the text
becomes the locus of supernatural irruptions that threaten to infect the
everyday world. In Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Dumas Club (1993),
Lucas Corso’s hunt for the Devil’s manual leads him into a Borgesian
world in which devil-worship sits alongside bibliography, in a novel that
veers from the grotesquely comic to the disturbingly sinister. John
Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) treats all forms of textual
communication as deceptive and destructive, in which epistemological
lacunae reveal ontological alterity. Finally, the best-selling Historian
(2005), Elizabeth Kostova’s modern reconstitution of the Dracula myth
as a bibliographic mystery, features vampiric texts that infect the
libraries of their victims and exude the stench of undeath …
Promising the privilege and completeness of structured knowledge,
these novels reveal the textual condition as masking disorder and
monstrosity, consequently raising disconcerting questions about
authority, truthfulness and human identity itself.
Franco Minganti (Università di Bologna), Acousmatics of the American
Gothic. Disseminations
The sonic universe of the American Gothic will be examined with repect
to the sonic identity of 19th century America, “hearing things”, and the
acousmatic reality of bodiless voices between religion and
ventriloquism. Starting with Charles Brockden Brown’s Carwin the
Biloquist, the presentation will map and sample the dissemination of
such themes in American imagination.
Rita Monticelli (Università di Bologna), “True Blood” sintetico: le
sovversioni post-gotiche di un’utopia pop
L’adattamento televisivo di The Sookie Stackhouse series, di Charlaine
Harris, True Blood (2008-) di Alan Ball, rappresenta diverse forme di
vita (e di morte, trattando soprattutto di vampiri) che superano il
pensiero binario, incentrandosi su nuove rappresentazioni di preferenze
sessuali, ‘etnie’, classi, coinvolgendo pregiudizi e diritti civili. La
fortunata serie televisiva, attraverso il grottesco, lo splatter punk, il
fantastico, il soprannaturale, riesce a superare la dicotomia umano-non
umano e a ritrarre un continuum di identità mutanti e mutate come
possibilità di dare spazio poetico e politico sia alle differenze che alle
multiformi esperienze che hanno luogo tra conscio e inconscio.
Considerato come horror, romance paranormale, dark romance, che si
muove tra favola, incubo, mitologia di vampiri, True Blood e’ soprattutto
una trasposizione televisiva della Southern Gothic literature, vicino ai
romanzi di Anne Rice, e non lontano dal Southern Gothic di Flannery
O’Connors. Il mio intervento cercherà di rileggere l’impiego dello
Southern Gothic non solo come critica sociale, ma anche come un
(rinnovato) tentativo postmoderno e post tecnologico di riconciliare
l’umano nelle sue diverse espressioni con il non-umano e le diverse
esperienze del se’.
David Levente Palatinus (University of Ruzomberok, Slovakia), Histories
of Futures Past? Gothic Nostalgias and the Screen of the Anthropocene
The purpose of this paper is to re-assess the role Gothic legacy plays in
contemporary film and television narratives of the Anthropocene,
especially as regards human-machine interaction and possible
interpretations of (post-)human history.
The past decade has seen a proliferation of narratives depicting
intersections between human and non-human (machine and / or animal).
Such metamorphoses, both at a conceptual as well as a bio-technological
level, render the future the embodiment of the Uncanny par excellence –
something that is both familiar/homely, and alien/fearful. This
juxtaposition of the ‘tremendum’ and the ‘fascinosum’ mobilizes the
iconographic and narrative legacy of the Gothic.
Recent literature on the conceptualization of the future (and
particularly the future of the human) suggests that we consider humans,
animals and machines as co-evolutive species (Stiegler 1998, 2009,
Choen 2011) inhabiting the same ecosystem (Zylinksa, 2011, Wark
2015). At the same time, cultural ideas about the Anthropocene are
frequently aligned with a post-human future that re-imagines humans in
a world after a cataclysmic event (Kurzweil 2005, Wark 2015, Bonneuil
and Fressoz 2016). Such a context implies not only apocalyptic scenarios
like a pandemic outbreak (Helix, Syfy 2014-), and environmental or
nuclear disaster (Oblivion (2013), After Earth (2013), Hunger Games
(2012-15)), or a technological singularity (Matrix (1999-2003), Almost
Human (Fox, 2013-14), Extant (CBS, 2014-15)), but, more generally, a
shift or a change in the global ecosystem that necessitates a radical repositioning of the human.
My questions are these: how do we explain this ‘Gothic revival’
underlying our cultural ideas about the future? Does it have to do with
the cultural, political, economic and environmental anxieties (and the
related ethical dilemmas) of our present historic time? Or does it have to
do with the fact that imaginings and conceptualizations of the future
have a history of their own - a ‘history of futures past’? Do these
imaginings of the future disclose a specific form of nostalgia in so far as
they inscribe themselves into the narrative of history itself? And what
does this history reveal about the futures of the human-to-come?
Francesca Saggini (Università della Tuscia a Viterbo), The Ghosts of the
Stage in M.G. Lewis’s ‘The Monk. A Romance’
My contribution looks at M. G. Lewis’s The Monk as the hypertextual
intersection of pre-existing cultural echoes and of implicit visual,
spectacular and theatrical signs. An enquiry into the theatrical
intertextuality of The Monk helps us to understand how the novel
appropriates and transforms theatre and spectacle at both the level of
forms and themes. Furthermore, the discourses of stage appropriation in
The Monk–projecting as they do the multiple languages of the theatre
and the visual shows on to the page–contribute to re-integrating the
novel within its genotype: Lewis’s unquestionably intergeneric oeuvre of
which The Monk seems to have been the monstrous hydrocephalus for
too long.
Diego Saglia (Università di Parma), Exotic Dystopias: Scripting Power in
Romantic-Period Gothic Orientalism
Besides formulating a series of positive images, early to mid eighteenthcentury “scripts” of the Orient mainly delineated a geopolitical
dimension characterized by forms of autocracy and despotism upheld by
cruelty and violence and encapsulated in the figure of the sultan or
caliph. When, near the end of the century, the Gothic aesthetic started to
colonize the imaginative territories of Orientalism, Gothic nightmares of
power began to interact with pre-existing images of Eastern despotism in
prose and, even more extensively, poetic works. A tentative list of such
texts ranges from William Beckford’s Vathek in the 1780s through
Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir and Robert Southey’s Thalaba and
Kehama to Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam and Thomas Moore’s
“The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” in the late 1810s. In order to open up
new insights into an otherwise familiar canon of texts, this paper
suggests that Gothic Orientalism of the Romantic period significantly
replaced the more circumscribed purview of earlier forms of Gothic
power – usually focusing on a victimized individual – with wider-
ranging visions of state systems based on collective coercion,
enslavement, torture and repression. This broader perspective could be
used to critique Eastern power structures in the context of British
imperial ideology, but also to denounce forms of tyranny closer to home.
A reassessment of Romantic-period Gothic Orientalism, this paper
highlights its ideological and political relevance as one of the most
significant ways in which Romantic-era writers represented and
problematized questions of power within an international, even global,
frame of reference. Such issues remain of relevance today, when current
representations of the East, and especially its Islamic areas, are once
more permeated with the terrifying power originally conjured up in
Gothic Orientalism of the Romantic period.
Gino Scatasta (Università di Bologna), Jack the Ripper, un eroe gotico?
Nell’agosto del 1888, quando iniziarono i delitti conosciuti come i
Whitechapel Murders attribuiti al misterioso Jack the Ripper, l’attore
americano Richard Mansfield si esibiva al Lyceum Theatre in un
adattamento teatrale dello Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde di
Stevenson, pubblicato due anni prima. La sua interpretazione era
talmente efficace che una lettera giunta a Scotland Yard arrivò a
indicarlo come l’esecutore dei delitti, data la sua abilità nell’assumere
personalità diverse, o quanto meno come un possibile ispiratore, sia pure
involontario, degli stessi delitti. Oggi l’ondata di terrore che avvolse
Londra nei mesi degli omicidi ci sembra esagerata, ma al tempo proprio
di terrore si trattò, fomentato dai giornali popolari e dall’intreccio di temi
che colpivano in profondità l’immaginario tardo-vittoriano, come la
fallen woman e le penose condizioni di vita dell’East End. Per affrontare
il trauma di quella serie di efferati omicidi e dare loro un senso era
comunque pronto un immaginario gotico che da un secolo si era spostato
sempre più vicino ai lettori, nel tempo e nello spazio: dall’Otranto
medievale ai vicoli di Londra. E a quella iconografia la stampa, le
illustrazioni e le ipotesi più deliranti attinsero a piene mani fino a
trasformare Jack the Ripper in un eroe gotico vittoriano, come mr. Hyde
e Dracula.
Maximiliaan van Woudenberg (Sheridan Institute of Technology), How
the Intersection of the German Gothic in Fantasmagoriana Inspired
Metamorphoses in Shelley’s Frankenstein
This paper explores the conference theme of Gothic Galaxy through the
dual articulation of Intersections and Metamorphoses. The first part of
the paper locates the inspirational origins of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece
Frankenstein (1818) in the intersection with the German gothic. It is
well-known that the reading of the French Fantasmagoriana (1812) by
the Byron-Shelley circle in June 1816 inspired the famous ghoststorytelling contest at he Villa Diodati that was the genesis of
Frankenstein. Lesser known are the original German ghost-stories from
Gespensterbuch (1810-1815) and Der Freimüthige (1810), that were
translated into the French, and English editions (Tales of the Dead,
1813). In particular, it was the “horror” and “gothic” elements in the
stories by the German author Friedrich von Laun (a.k.a. Friedrich
Schulze) that left an impression on Mary Shelley and was one of her
inspirations for the famous bedroom-window scene. The first section
concludes by foregrounding how intersections with the gothic functioned
as an inspirational force fostering new explorations of the genre.
The second part of the paper shifts the focus to how these German
gothic elements translated in the French Fantasmagoriana underwent a
metamorphosis through their incorporation into Frankenstein. The global
fascination with this gothic novel is undoubtedly indebted to Shelley’s
genius, but also because the creation of Frankenstein functions as a
palimpsest of the German gothic. The original German sources, author,
and genre of the schauerliteratur [trans. shudder/horror literature] are
obscured through the cross-cultural translation of the German gothic into
French. As such, several gothic parts in Frankenstein are much like the
creation of the Monster, cobbled together from different sources, origins
unknown. This section will disentangle the German gothic in several
scenes in Frankenstein suggesting that the enduring popularity of the
novel is partly because it successfully obscured its “foreign”, that is to
say non-English, influences of the gothic.
Angela Wright (University of Sheffield), Terror, Horror and
Transformation: Gothic Metamorphoses from Ann Radcliffe to Mary
Shelley
My paper will trace the continuities, ruptures and transformations of
the Gothic genre between the decade of the 1790s, when Ann Radcliffe
‘the great enchantress’ was at the pinnacle of her powers and fame.
After 1797, when she ceased to publish, and the literary marketplace
became flooded with inferior imitations of her work, the literary Gothic
appeared to be on the wane, a moribund form of fiction no longer suited
to serve the changing literary climate. When Mary Shelley’s
‘Frankenstein’ first appeared, therefore, it was not immediately
associated with the Gothic in 1818. Since then, it has become the work
that is both the recognisable brand of Gothic to the minds of many,
while it at the same time it remains the work that marked a rupture, a
metamorphosis in the Gothic. My paper will aim to trace the continuities
and transformations of the Gothic in Mary Shelley’s fiction, through
analysing the aesthetics of terror and horror, and her radical reengagement with those aesthetics. My paper will both offer perspective
on the aesthetics of terror in the Radcliffean novel of the 1790s, while
tracing that form forward to reappraise how it is used both in and beyond
Frankenstein.