Gothic Cabala

Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic's engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century. Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Davison interprets the changing significance of the trans-national Wandering Jew in classic Gothic fiction who later migrates into Victorian realism. What emerges is the elucidation of an anti-Semitic 'spectropoetics' that convey how the spectres of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt British literature.

"The figure of the Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature has been generally regarded as a static and romantic Everyman who signifies religious punishment, remorse, and alienation. In that it fails to consider the fact that the legend of the Wandering Jew signalled a noteworthy historical shift from theological to racial anti-Semitism, this reading has overlooked the significance of this figure's specific ethno-religious aspect and its relation to the figure of the vampire. It has hindered, consequently, the recognition of the Wandering Jew's relevance to the "Jewish Question," a vital issue in the construction of British national identity. In this dissertation, I chronicle the "spectropoetics" of Gothic literature---how the spectres, of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt the British Gothic novel. I trace this "spectropoetics" through medieval anti-Semitism, and consider its significance in addressing anxieties about the Crypto-Jew and the Cabala's role in secret societies during two major historic events concurrent with the period of classic Gothic literature---the Spanish Inquisition, a narrative element featured in many Gothic works, and the French Revolution, a cataclysmic event to which many Gothic works responded. In the light of this complex of concerns, I examine the role of the Wandering Jew in five Gothic works---Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk (1795), William Godwin's St. Leon (1799), Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872), and Brain Stoker's Dracula (1897). In my conclusion, I delineate the vampiric Wandering Jew's "eternal" role in addressing nationalist concerns by examining his symbolic preeminence in Nazi Germany." --

This book uncovers the early Jewish, Scottish, and Stuart sources of "ancient" Cabalistic Freemasonry. Drawing on architectural, technological, political, and religious documents, it provides the historical context for Masonic traditions of visionary Temple building and mystical fraternity.

Expanding the perspective initiated by British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature (0-312-29522-7), this volume explores more deeply the complexities inherent in the relationship between the British and Jewish cultures as initiated in the Romantic Period in England, though extending to the present in the Middle East.

Alms for Oblivion was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This volume makes available in book form a collection of seventeen essays by Edward Dahlberg, who has been called one of the great unrecognized writers of our time. Some of the selections have never been published before; others have appeared previously only in magazines of limited circulation. There is a foreword by Sir Herbert Read. The individual essays are on a wide range of subjects: literary, historical, philosophical, personal. The longest is a discussion of Herman Melville's work entitled "Moby-Dick - A Hamitic Dream." The fate of authors at the hands of reviewers is the subject of the essay called "For Sale." In "No Love and No Thanks" the author draws a characterization of our time. He presents a critique of the poet William Carlos Williams in "Word-Sick and Place- Crazy," and a discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Peopleless Fiction." In "My Friends Stieglitz, Anderson, and Dreiser" he discusses not only Alfred Stieglitz, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser but other personalities as well. He also writes of Sherwood Anderson in "Midwestern Fable." In "Cutpurse Philosopher" the subject is William James. "Florentine Codex" is about the conquistadores. Other essays in the collection are the following: "Randolph Bourne," "Our Vanishing Cooperative Colonies," "Chivers and Poe," "Domestic Manners of Americans," "Robert McAlmon: A Memoir," "The Expatriates: A Memoir," and an essay on Allen Tate.

Winner of the 1997 International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Best Non-fiction Book In 1897, Archibald Constable & Company published a novel by the unheralded Bram Stoker. That novel, Dracula, has gone on to become perhaps the most influential novel of all time. To commemorate the centennial of that great novel, Carol Margaret Davison has brought together this collection of essays by some of the world’s leading scholars. The essays analyze Stoker’s original novel and celebrate its legacy in popular culture. The continuing presence of Dracula and vampire fiction and films provides proof that, as Davison writes, Dracula is "alive and sucking." "Dracula is a Gothic mandala, a vast design in which multiple reflections of the elements of the genre are configured in elegant sets of symmetries. It is also a sort of lens, bringing focus and compression to diverse Gothic motifs, including not only vampirism but madness, the night, spoiled innocence, disorder in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the ruin, and the tomb. Gathering up and unifying all that came before it, and casting its great shadow over all that came and continues to come after, its influence on twentieth-century Gothic fiction and film is unique and irresistible." from the Preface by Patrick McGrath

Dog Horn Publishing brings together the best weird fiction from new writers north of Watford. From gothic fairytale to humorous pop-culture satire, five of the North's top writers showcase the diversity of British talent that exists outside the country's capital and put their strange, funny, mythical landscapes firmly on the literary map.

The cultural products of new religions and spiritualities are frequently ignored or dismissed within academia, often stemming from a hesitation to acknowledge these movements as genuine. This volume explores the impact of new religions upon cultural production, exemplifying the theological and spiritual principles of particular movements and demonstrating their substantial impact on wider society. Contributions explore the realms of music, architecture, food, art, books, films, video games, and more. This scholarship will be of interest to those who wish to explore the gamut of modern religious expression, and those who wish to broaden their knowledge of the spiritual origins of human culture.