Gothic Peregrinations

For over two hundred years, the Gothic has remained fixed in the European and American imaginations, steadily securing its position as a global cultural mode in recent decades. The globalization of Gothic studies has resulted in the proliferation of new critical concepts and a growing academic interest in the genre. Yet, despite its longevity, unprecedented expansion, and accusations of prescriptiveness, the Gothic remains elusive and without a straightforward definition. Gothic Peregrinations: The Unexplored and Re-explored Territories looks at Gothic productions largely marginalized in the studies of the genre, including the European absorption of and response to the Gothic. This collection of essays identifies landmarks and ley lines in the insufficiently probed territories of Gothic scholarship and sets out to explore its unmapped regions. This volume not only examines Gothic peregrinations from a geographical perspective but also investigates how the genre has been at odds with strict demarcation of generic boundaries. Analyzing texts which come from outside the Gothic canon, yet prove to be deeply indebted to it, like bereavement memoirs, stories produced by and about factory girls of Massachusetts, and the Mattel Monster High franchise, this volume illuminates the previously unexplored fields in Gothic studies. The chapters in this volume reveal the truly transnational expansion of the Gothic and the importance of exchange – exchange now seen not only as crucial to the genre’s gestation, or vital to the processes of globalization, but also to legitimizing Gothic studies in the global world.

Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published in 1818, the story of the scientist and his Creature has been constantly told, discussed, adapted, filmed, and translated, making generations of readers approach the novel in an extraordinary variety of ways and languages. This new collection of nineteen essays brings together a range of international scholars to provide an introduction to, and a series of pathways through, this iconic novel. Chapters explore various topics, from the Bible, mythology, ruins, and human rights, to the sublime, the epistolary, and acoustics. They also place the novel in a wider cultural context, exploring its numerous afterlives, its reception, and adaptations in different media, such as drama, cinema, graphic novels, television series, and computer games. Aimed at both scholars and new readers of Frankenstein, in its different guises, this volume stimulates an informed appreciation of one of the most influential and haunting novels of all time.

This book is written in an accessible style, and draws together a wide range of modern and contemporary Gothic texts from throughout the Americas (including Gothic drama as well as fiction). The title offers a decolonizing approach to the Gothic that has not previously been touched on much in the genre. The book is unique in its treatment of its subject; there are very few titles that study childhood and the Gothic in the Americas

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

This book resituates Francis Sylvester Mahony in an early nineteenth-century literary-historical context, counteracting the efforts of twentieth-century literary historians to obscure his contribution to the emergence of a distinctive Irish Catholic fiction in English. This volume re-explores his ambivalent role as a Catholic unionist contributor to the progressive Tory London periodical, Fraser’s Magazine, examining his use of translation to map out an alternative literary aesthetic of the peripheries. The book also traces the development of his political thinking in his Italian journalism for Charles Dickens’ Daily News, in which he responded to the events of the Famine by finding common cause with Young Ireland, and looks afresh at his final incarnation as a British Liberal commentator on Irish and European affairs for the Globe newspaper. More broadly, the book seeks to re-evaluate Mahony’s cosmopolitan writings in relation to the multifaceted, transnational perspectives on Irish, British, and European affairs presented in his essays and journalism.

This work investigates women’s emancipation writing in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Many novelists in various national literatures touched upon the theme of an emancipated woman in the long nineteenth century and at the fin de siècle. Philosophers, poets, writers, and journalists were concerned with this problem and began popularizing wholeheartedly the so-called "burning" questions. The new femininity was represented not only in the Christian context; many other traditions and cultures opened the discussion about the women’s lot. This volume analyzes women’s literary voices from different parts of the world—Turkey, England, the U.S., Italy, Russia, Spain, and others. Imagination, as it is believed, has no borders and is dialogical in its nature.

This study of Nicholas Nickleby takes the Dickens novel which is perhaps the least critically discussed, though it is very popular, and examines its appeal and its significance, and finds it one of the most rewarding and powerful of Dickens’s texts. Nicholas Nickleby deals with the abduction and destruction of children, often with the collusion of their parents. It concentrates on this theme in a way which continues from Oliver Twist, describing such oppression, and the resistance to it, in the language of melodrama, of parody and comedy. With chapters on the school-system that Dickens attacks, and its grotesque embodiment in Squeers, and with discussion of how the novel reshapes eighteenth century literary traditions, and such topics as the novel’s comedy, and the concept of the ‘humorist’; and ‘theatricality’ and its debt to Carlyle,, the book delves into the way that the novel explores madness within the city in those whose lives have been fractured, or ruined, as so many have been, and considers the symptoms of hypocrisy in the lives of the oppressors and the oppressed alike; taking hypocrisy as a Dickensian subject which deserves further examination. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death explores ways in which Dickens draws on medieval and baroque traditions in how he analyses death and its grotesquerie, especially drawing on the visual tradition of the ‘dance of death’ which is referred to here and which is prevalent throughout Dickens’s novels. It shows these traditions to be at the heart of London, and aims to illuminate a strand within Dickens’s thinking from first to last. Drawing on the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, and with close detailed readings of such well-known figures as Mrs Nickleby, Vincent Crummles and his theatrical troupe, and Mr Mantalini, and attention to Dickens’s description, imagery, irony, and sense of the singular, this book is a major study which will help in the revaluation of Dickens’s early novels.

George Reynolds is arguably the most prolific of all nineteenth-century English novelists, reaching an enormous audience through his thirty-six novels. Often selling in very large numbers in weekly one-penny installments, his works were known as by the most popular English novelist ever. Yet today, he remains almost unknown in the canon of English Literature. A serious radical, strongly pro-woman, and a leading Chartist seeking the vote for all men, Reynolds’ vigorous heroines differ notably from the Victorian novelists’ timid norm. He was strongly pro-Jewish and pro-Gypsy, very interested in French and Italian society, but wrote for ordinary English working people. Dickens thought him a dangerous leftist: for all these reasons, he was excluded from the elite literary world. G. W. M. Reynolds: The Man Who Outsold Dickens reestablishes Reynolds as a major figure of mid-nineteenth-century fiction and an author of European range and status. This book examines his massive popularity and notable concern with the problems of ordinary people, especially women, in the complex and often dangerous new world of the modern city. With the support of his wife Susannah, Reynolds’ enormous influence would also make a contribution to the cause of mass political education through his role in the development of popular fiction and journalism. This book is a major innovation in the field of Victorian literary studies, with relevance to popular cultural studies, the politics of literature, and publishing history, presenting properly a much overlooked major English novelist.