Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Gothic & Romance

Modern Gothic culture alternately fascinates, horrifies, or bewilders many of us. We cringe at pictures of Marilyn Manson, cheer for Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and try not to stare at the pierced and tattooed teens we pass on the streets. But what is it about this dark and morbidly morose aesthetic that fascinates us today? In Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner probes the reasons behind the prevalence of the Gothic in popular culture and how it has inspired innovative new work in film, literature, music, and art.
Spooner traces the emergence of the Gothic...

Gothic and Modernism establishes and interprets the significant presence and the transformations of the Gothic tradition at the dark heart of writing during the long twentieth century. Artfully introduced and collected by John Paul Riquelme, the essays--nine previously published in Modern Fiction Studies--reveal challenges to both realism and to optimistic Enlightenment attitudes in the narratives and the styles of writers ranging from Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett, Octavia Butler, and Bret Easton Ellis.

In examining nineteenth-century works and...

This study addresses the intersection of literature and visual culture in examining the place of vision (the visible, the invisible, the imaginary) in Romanticism. It explores literary engagements with the expanding visual field, arguing that the popular culture of Regency Britain reflected not just emergent and highly capitalized forms of mass entertainment, but also a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. Moreover, what is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible reveals a generative fascination with the visual and its conceptual as...

A comprehensive study of the influence Spenser had on the forms, images, and style of the principal Romantic poets, this volume explores how Spenserianism pervades not just their writings but also the subconscious thinking and spirit of the Romantic era.

Edmund Spenser's tremendous popularity among the Romantics has always been recognized, but his role in their poetics has never been extensively explored because of a widely shared scholarly assumption about the intellectual superficiality of their response to him. Many of the Romantics honored Spenser as their favorite poet, the muse...

This collection recovers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare's late plays. Although Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest have long been characterized as "romances," their connections with the popular prose romances of their day and the dramatic romances that preceded them have frequently been overlooked. Constructed to explore those connections, this volume includes...

When Emily Bronte was studying music in Brussels in 1842, she was drawn into the city's appreciation of Beethoven. After her exposure to the works of the great composer, Bronte's creativity flourished and she went on to compose what was to be her only novel--Wuthering Heights.

In "Emily Bronte and Beethoven," Robert K. Wallace continues to work from the perspective he developed in his "Jane Austen and Mozart"--integrating two fields that have traditionally been kept apart. Wallace compares Bronte and Beethoven through a close examination of the Romantic traits that their works share....

We do it in the dark. Under the sheets. With a penlight. We wear sunglasses and a baseball hat at the bookstore. We have a "special place" where we store them. Let's face it: Not many folks are willing to publicly admit they love romance novels. Meanwhile, romance continues to be the bestselling fiction genre. Ever. So what's with all the shame?

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan--the creators of the wildly popular blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books--have no shame They look at the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of romance novels and tackle...

The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth collects 31 letters that William Wordsworth exchanged with his wife, Mary, during the early years of their marriage. These letters fifteen from William to Mary and sixteen from her to him were written during William's absences from home in 1810 and 1812 and offer an entirely new way of looking at the poet and his married life.

Reproduced here with an informative introduction and headnotes by Beth Darlington that set each missive in biographical context, the letters cover a wide range of topics: village life, Regency politics,...