Les Vestiges Du Gothique

Entre Seine et Rhin, Tournai, ville des anciens Pays-Bas relevant de la couronne de France et siège épiscopal du comté de Flandre, a connu du xiie au xve siècle son rayonnement le plus large. Un de ses atouts résidait dans la pierre sombre extraite de son sous-sol. Celle-ci permit à la cité non seulement de se couvrir d'un nombre impressionnant d'édifices - au premier rang desquels la cathédrale Notre-Dame - mais aussi de développer une singulière production de lames funéraires gravées, gisants en relief et stèles votives qui contribuèrent notoirement à la réputation de ses ateliers. Exportées parfois très loin, par-delà les mers, ces ouvres couvrirent aussi le sol et les murs des sanctuaires de la ville. Véritable miroir de ses élites, elles y ont condensé des décennies d'histoire urbaine. À cette parure de pierre riche de mille visages et d'autant d'images de dévotion faisaient écho d'autres sculptures, ornant les ensembles mobiliers - jubés, retables, etc. - des églises. Les aléas de l'Histoire se chargèrent d'annihiler, ou presque, tout cet apparat médiéval. La crise iconoclaste de 1566 ne laissa de ces ouvres que quelques épaves blessées, les réaménagements ultérieurs des édifices de culte aux xviie et xviiie siècles achevant la besogne. De ce patrimoine d'une richesse inouïe ne sont donc conservés aujourd'hui que de rares témoins, fragmentaires pour la plupart, réapparus lors de fouilles ou de travaux. Ils constituent désormais une poignante collection qui connaît le triste sort d'être aujourd'hui devenue invisible depuis la fermeture de la section médiévale du musée de Tournai, voici un quart de siècle, et celle plus récente du chour gothique de la cathédrale en restauration. Là est, parmi d'autres, l'enjeu de cet ouvrage : faire redécouvrir ce corpus lapidaire tournaisien dans lequel s'est stratifiée la mémoire longue d'une ville et lui procurer enfin toute la lumière qu'il mérite.

This volume provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Gothic, the earliest attested language of the Germanic family (apart from runic inscriptions). It is the first in English to draw on the recently discovered Bologna fragment and Crimean graffiti, in addition to the traditional Bible translation explored in most works to date.

This is the first major full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with a rich store of historical sources, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction is an historicist survey of nineteenth-century Gothic writing--from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic 'returned' at the so-called fin de siècle. Robert Mighall, by contrast, demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from late eighteenth century, through the 'Urban Gothic' fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the 'Suburban Gothic' of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century's close. Mighall challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction which currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period.

Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840 provides the first sustained scholarly account of the relationship between Gothic architecture and Gothic literature (fiction; poetry; drama) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although the relationship between literature and architecture is a topic that has long preoccupied scholars of the literary Gothic, there remains, to date, no monograph-length study of the intriguing and complex interactions between these two aesthetic forms. Equally, Gothic literature has received only the most cursory of treatments in art-historical accounts of the early Gothic Revival in architecture, interiors, and design. In addressing this gap in contemporary scholarship, Gothic Antiquity seeks to situate Gothic writing in relation to the Gothic-architectural theories, aesthetics, and practices with which it was contemporary, providing closely historicized readings of a wide selection of canonical and lesser-known texts and writers. Correspondingly, it shows how these architectural debates responded to, and were to a certain extent shaped by, what we have since come to identify as the literary Gothic mode. In both its 'survivalist' and 'revivalist' forms, the architecture of the Middle Ages in the long eighteenth century was always much more than a matter of style. Incarnating, for better or for worse, the memory of a vanished 'Gothic' age in the modern, enlightened present, Gothic architecture, be it ruined or complete, prompted imaginative reconstructions of the nation's past—a notable 'visionary' turn, as the antiquary John Pinkerton put it in 1788, in which Gothic writers, architects, and antiquaries enthusiastically participated. The volume establishes a series of dialogues between Gothic literature, architectural history, and the antiquarian interest in the material remains of the Gothic past, and argues that these discrete yet intimately related approaches to vernacular antiquity are most fruitfully read in relation to one another.

As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Bront&ës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as &"victim feminism,&" arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that &"professional femininity&"&—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions&—best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters&—and readers&—fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system. Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.