Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Gothic & Romance

This book investigates the productive crosscurrents between visual culture and literary texts in the Romantic period, focusing on the construction and manipulation of the visual, the impact of new visual media on the literary and historical imagination, and on fragments and ruins as occupying the shifting border between the visible and the invisible. It examines a broad selection of instances that reflect debates over how seeing should itself be viewed: instances, from Daguerre's Diorama, to the staging of Coleridge's play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley's poetry and at the...

For many eighteenth-century thinkers, happiness was a revolutionary new idea filled with the promise of the Enlightenment. However, Vivasvan Soni argues that the period fails to establish the importance of happiness as a guiding idea for human practice, generating our modern sentimental idea of happiness. Mourning Happiness shows how the eighteenth century's very obsession with happiness culminates in the political obsolescence of the idea.

Soni explains that this puzzling phenomenon can only be comprehended by studying a structural transformation of the idea of happiness at...

In part because of the huge success of his novel "Dracula," Bram Stoker is largely responsible for moving the gothic out of medieval castles and into the center of modern life, using gothic motifs and conventions to examine social, economic, and political problems. In "Bram Stoker," Carol A. Senf offers a detailed and accessible introduction to the entirety of Stoker s oeuvre, focusing on his contributions to the modern notion of the gothic.
During his lifetime, Stoker authored seventeen books in addition to "Dracula," as well as several short stories, many of which were not...

This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture.

The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the...

One of the most successful and critically acclaimed authors in Britain, Patrick McGrath has also been a key figure in the recent resurgence of interest in the Gothic. This book, the first full-length study of McGrath and his work, looks at McGrath s writing through the lens of the Gothic, showing how he has pushed the boundaries of the genre, using the conventional trappings of the Gothic in creative, even parodic new ways. Drawn in part from interviews with McGrath, some previously unpublished, the book not only sets McGrath s work in the context of the Gothic tradition and his own times,...

In Transcending Textuality, Ariadna Garcia-Bryce provides a fresh look at post-Trent political culture and Francisco de Quevedo's place within it by examining his works in relation to two potentially rival means of transmitting authority: spectacle and print. Quevedo's highly theatrical conceptions of power are identified with court ceremony, devotional ritual, monarchical and spiritual imagery, and religious and classical oratory. At the same time, his investment in physical and emotional display is shown to be fraught with concern about the decline of body-centered modes of...

In Transcending Textuality, Ariadna Garcia-Bryce provides a fresh look at post-Trent political culture and Francisco de Quevedo's place within it by examining his works in relation to two potentially rival means of transmitting authority: spectacle and print. Quevedo's highly theatrical conceptions of power are identified with court ceremony, devotional ritual, monarchical and spiritual imagery, and religious and classical oratory. At the same time, his investment in physical and emotional display is shown to be fraught with concern about the decline of body-centered modes of...

The European esoteric tradition was introduced into Russia in the eighteenth century by Freemasons and continued in Russian romantic literature of the early nineteenth century.

This study, which conjoins historiographical methods developed by modern scholars of esoterica and formalist methods of textual analysis, reveals the role of that tradition in Russian romantic literature. It deals extensively with Decembrism, the political conspiracy so known after its culmination in a failed attempt to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. The Decembrist writers and other...

First published in 1972, Norman Page 's seminal study of The Language of Jane Austen seeks to demonstrate both the exceptional nature and the degree of subtlety of Jane Austen 's use of language.

As well as examining the staple items of her vocabulary and some of the characteristic patterns of her syntax, attention is paid to her use of dialogue and of the letter form. The aim of the study is not simply to analyse linguistic qualities for their own sake but to employ close verbal analysis to enrich the critical understanding of Jane Austen 's novels.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of...

The American author Charles Brockden Brown (1771 1810) is a controversial figure within the field of Gothic studies. He was admired by nineteenth-century literary figures such as Poe, Hawthorne, George Lippard (who dedicated his gothic novel "Quaker City" to him), and John Greenleaf Whittier; identified as an important figure in the development of the American literary tradition by critical heavyweights including R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Chase, Harry Levin, and Leslie Fiedler; and clearly influential to the entire American Gothic tradition. However, it remains true that Brown is seldom read...