#the gothic

[disregardcanon]

Its (The Gothic) style will tend to be ornate, unnatural and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a single moral function- that of provoking unease.

Angela Carter's Afterward to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces

[themonstrousother-moved]

The Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner

[redpenbn]

The only difference between Will and the traditional Gothic hero (ine) is that he’s already possessed when the Devil shows up.

And Satan Is really into it, because he always is.

Monday thoughts.

[artigas]

an intro to the gothic: non-fiction recs

a friend recently asked me for book recs on the history of the gothic novel, so I thought I'd throw together a quick, non-exhaustive list of non-fiction recommendations:

The Gothic by Fred Bottling: roughly 200 pages long, this book is such a great introduction to the gothic and its many iterations since its emergence in the mid-18th century. very accessible, gives you a good overview rather than very specificized or niche depth.

The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology by Kate Ferguson Ellis: Focusing especially on the emergence of the middle-class female reading audience in the 18th century, Ellis traces the direct connection between the growing idealization of the home/domestic sphere and the popularity of the Gothic genre (women, importantly, were the primary consumers of Gothic fiction!)

Colonial and Post Colonial Gothic: The Carribean by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert: a really fantastic article which highlights the role of imperialism, colonialization, and slavery within the early Gothic genre. I found the full PDF online -- please enjoy!

The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction: another really fantastic collection of essays which outline the history and the progression of the gothic across time (from the 1700's to the present) and space (starting in Great Britain than moving through and across the Atlantic). Like Bottling's text, this book would serve as a great critical introduction for those new to the genre.

Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: this essay isn't strictly about the gothic, but it gives a useful and very popular framework for how to culturally and critically interpret the monster which lends itself very helpfully, i think, with studying Gothic texts. full article available here.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: again, not strictly about the Gothic but still a worthwhile book to check out. at 700 pages, this is a tome of critical essays. some of it is a bit outdated, i don't personally agree with some of their interpretations (but that, arguably, makes their criticism all the more useful!) -- I don't think you need to read this entire book if you're not inclined, but their interpretations of Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights is worth skimming if you're interested in a feminist analysis of these gothic and gothic-adjacent texts.

if anyone's interested, i can compile a rec list of critical articles or a list of gothic fiction for those who are newly interested in reading the genre!! i hope this is a helpful resource for now -- happy reading and many thanks to @girlfan for the inspo!

[marlocandeea]

I never found it satisfying when the girl just runs away from the haunted house. Why? There's still ghosts, there's still demons in there! Are you just leaving the work unfinished? Who's going to fix all that? But now I get it. Believing that we can fix it, undo it, clean it up, love it back to health, is how the dark side can seduce and fool us. It can fool us dead in fact. 

-The final girl trope, revisited (newsletter)

[devoutjunk]

"Not long ago an outlet interviewed an author whose book was marketed as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey. I adore retellings, and I’m fascinated by work that examines gender in antiquity. But I felt my hopes fall when the author readily admitted to never having read the epic, dismissing the poem as backward and boring, whereas her tale—of course—was dynamic and new. Well, I thought, that’s not a fucking retelling then, is it? Retellings can and do grapple with or criticize or slyly comment on their source texts, but buried in the premise of the genre or form is an actual, active engagement with the story being retold. This desire for genre’s trappings without any of its rhetorical commitments or risks is not unique to contemporary SFF. How often does a show marketed as a social satire lack the courage to commit to its critique, or a mystery novel make certain promises within its premise that it fails to meet (or creatively subvert)?

Caroline, you might be saying by now, who cares where a book gets shelved at Barnes and Noble or if VampyreBabe98 thinks Anne Rice is committing thought crimes from beyond the grave? And you know what, fair. There is so much to care about, and so much more pressing and dire than any of this bullshit. But I still think we need the tools of genre more than ever, and we need the varied worlds and works genre fiction offers us in all their nuance and complication. Le Guin wrote:

“To describe society since the mid twentieth century— global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked— we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy. García Márquez wrote his histories of his own nation in the fantastic images of magical realism because it was the only way he could do it.”

Fantasy, she claims in the same essay, is our first and oldest kind of fiction, and perhaps that long lineage sometimes allows us to explore in the realm of the fantastic what we cannot off the page or confined by the limits of a more realist lexicon.  There are many great contemporary genre authors following in Márquez’s footsteps, writing their vital histories and futures in the only way they can, with the tools at hand. I hope when those books find their readers, we are ready for them, and we read them with the care and curiosity they deserve."

--Caroline Shea (April Newsletter: New Fiction, Imagined Languages, and Who's Afraid of Genre? (pt. 1000))

[garlandedspirits]

Paolo Santangelo, for the introduction to Zibuyu, “What The Master Would Not Discuss”, according to Yuan Mei (1716 - 1798): A Collection of Supernatural Stories