Robert Mighall
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262182
- eISBN:
- 9780191698835
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262182.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-century Gothic ...
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This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-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. By contrast, this book demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from the late 18th 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' close. The book challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction that 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.Less
This book is a full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with historical sources, this book is a historicist survey of 19th-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. By contrast, this book demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from the late 18th 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' close. The book challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction that 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.
John Wilson Foster
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199232833
- eISBN:
- 9780191716454
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232833.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter begins with a discussion of Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Man. It then discusses the work of Elliot O'Donnell, including Werewolves. It then analyzes detective fiction.
This chapter begins with a discussion of Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Man. It then discusses the work of Elliot O'Donnell, including Werewolves. It then analyzes detective fiction.
Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748619061
- eISBN:
- 9780748670888
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748619061.003.0022
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and ...
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This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan became an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Gone With The Wind Plus Fangs’: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Thomas Austin, which examines the particular means by which film in the early 1990s was distinguished by a so-called ‘industrially motivated hybridity’. This describes the means by which film creates appeal not through any singular or unified style, but through promotional and conversational processes of fragmentation, elaboration and diffusion.Less
This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan became an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Gone With The Wind Plus Fangs’: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Thomas Austin, which examines the particular means by which film in the early 1990s was distinguished by a so-called ‘industrially motivated hybridity’. This describes the means by which film creates appeal not through any singular or unified style, but through promotional and conversational processes of fragmentation, elaboration and diffusion.
Mighall Robert
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262182
- eISBN:
- 9780191698835
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262182.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. ...
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This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. It explains how the vampire played an important role in the definition of the category of the sadist, aided writers in their portrayal of sexuality, and helped science to explain moral monstrosity. It contends that Bram Stoker's Dracula provided the best example of Gothic fiction's departure from the aims and procedures of psychiatric discourse.Less
This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. It explains how the vampire played an important role in the definition of the category of the sadist, aided writers in their portrayal of sexuality, and helped science to explain moral monstrosity. It contends that Bram Stoker's Dracula provided the best example of Gothic fiction's departure from the aims and procedures of psychiatric discourse.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph ...
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This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.Less
This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853238492
- eISBN:
- 9781846315404
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315404.015
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Bram Stoker's Dracula focuses on an undead vampire count from Transylvania who effectively invades fin de siècle London. Seward's asylum in London occupies much of the central space of the novel, and ...
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Bram Stoker's Dracula focuses on an undead vampire count from Transylvania who effectively invades fin de siècle London. Seward's asylum in London occupies much of the central space of the novel, and its proximity to the chapel suggests a tension between religion and science. Addiction is mirrored by Dracula's compulsive need to consume human blood on a regular basis in order to maintain his spectral existence. There are numerous references to narcotics in the novel, such as when Van Helsing administers a ‘hypodermic injection of morphia’ to the increasingly vampirised Lucy Westenra to balance her escalating needs for addictive blood transfusions. That the vampire inhabits a fragmented nation such as Transylvania brings up the issue of European identity. Dracula also explores other issues such as the morphine debate, nymphomania, and modernity.Less
Bram Stoker's Dracula focuses on an undead vampire count from Transylvania who effectively invades fin de siècle London. Seward's asylum in London occupies much of the central space of the novel, and its proximity to the chapel suggests a tension between religion and science. Addiction is mirrored by Dracula's compulsive need to consume human blood on a regular basis in order to maintain his spectral existence. There are numerous references to narcotics in the novel, such as when Van Helsing administers a ‘hypodermic injection of morphia’ to the increasingly vampirised Lucy Westenra to balance her escalating needs for addictive blood transfusions. That the vampire inhabits a fragmented nation such as Transylvania brings up the issue of European identity. Dracula also explores other issues such as the morphine debate, nymphomania, and modernity.
Alison Milbank
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198824466
- eISBN:
- 9780191863257
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198824466.003.0012
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with ...
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The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with The Snake’s Pass an allegory of this proto-ecumenism. The influence of the Anglican idea of the via media, central to Victorian theology, is traced in his work, and compared with the influence of Walt Whitman’s model of comradeship and nation. In particular, F. D. Maurice’s inclusive ecclesiology is at work in Dracula, where the vampire acts as an Antichrist whose economy of substitutionary sacrifice is opposed by a union of Protestant word (diaries, typing) and Catholic sacramentals (Eucharistic host, etc.) and acts of mutual self-sacrifice and reciprocity such as the blood-transfusions. Maurice’s questioning of eternal damnation and Gladstone’s idea of immortal life as a gift are also important in a novel that aims to redeem even Dracula himself.Less
The theological dimension to Bram Stoker’s work is totally neglected and yet, like Maturin, Stoker can be shown to be seeking a mediation between Catholic and Protestant, and Irish and English, with The Snake’s Pass an allegory of this proto-ecumenism. The influence of the Anglican idea of the via media, central to Victorian theology, is traced in his work, and compared with the influence of Walt Whitman’s model of comradeship and nation. In particular, F. D. Maurice’s inclusive ecclesiology is at work in Dracula, where the vampire acts as an Antichrist whose economy of substitutionary sacrifice is opposed by a union of Protestant word (diaries, typing) and Catholic sacramentals (Eucharistic host, etc.) and acts of mutual self-sacrifice and reciprocity such as the blood-transfusions. Maurice’s questioning of eternal damnation and Gladstone’s idea of immortal life as a gift are also important in a novel that aims to redeem even Dracula himself.
Laura Helen Marks
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042140
- eISBN:
- 9780252050886
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042140.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of ...
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This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of Dracula, porn adaptations of the novel must carefully navigate gender and sexuality. These adaptations reveal how hardcore film as a whole operates on anxious ground similar to that of Stoker’s novel, simultaneously invoking and resisting sexual anxieties concerning gendered penetration, gendered fluids, and consumption. Dracula, as a culture text, mobilizes queered, gendered, and raced reformulations of consumer and consumed, queering ostensibly straight pornographies, destabilizing supposedly rigid gender dynamics, and resituating the colonial Other. Dracula adaptations invoke and redeploy the racialized implications of nineteenth-century vampirism, channeling racial and sexual subjectivity through vampirism. Dracula penetrates a supposedly sanctified pornotopia, enabling diverse and perverse sexual representations that are instructive in understanding pornography as erotically engaged with sexual fluidity, genre instability, and oscillating power dynamics.Less
This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of Dracula, porn adaptations of the novel must carefully navigate gender and sexuality. These adaptations reveal how hardcore film as a whole operates on anxious ground similar to that of Stoker’s novel, simultaneously invoking and resisting sexual anxieties concerning gendered penetration, gendered fluids, and consumption. Dracula, as a culture text, mobilizes queered, gendered, and raced reformulations of consumer and consumed, queering ostensibly straight pornographies, destabilizing supposedly rigid gender dynamics, and resituating the colonial Other. Dracula adaptations invoke and redeploy the racialized implications of nineteenth-century vampirism, channeling racial and sexual subjectivity through vampirism. Dracula penetrates a supposedly sanctified pornotopia, enabling diverse and perverse sexual representations that are instructive in understanding pornography as erotically engaged with sexual fluidity, genre instability, and oscillating power dynamics.
Matthew Rubery
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195369267
- eISBN:
- 9780199871148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195369267.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this ...
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Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.Less
Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853238393
- eISBN:
- 9781846314186
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853238393.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter discusses how notions of degeneration enter into that most potent of late nineteenth-century myths, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It examines what conception of insanity informs Stoker's ...
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This chapter discusses how notions of degeneration enter into that most potent of late nineteenth-century myths, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It examines what conception of insanity informs Stoker's writing, what part it plays in the novel as a whole, and how it relates to the novel's ideas about masculinity. In so doing, it focuses on the complex interplay of realism and fantasy, and with the progressive dissolution of the demarcation between sanity and madness.Less
This chapter discusses how notions of degeneration enter into that most potent of late nineteenth-century myths, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It examines what conception of insanity informs Stoker's writing, what part it plays in the novel as a whole, and how it relates to the novel's ideas about masculinity. In so doing, it focuses on the complex interplay of realism and fantasy, and with the progressive dissolution of the demarcation between sanity and madness.
Dorothea Schuller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089770
- eISBN:
- 9781781708651
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089770.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's ...
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This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's 2002 film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's dance adaptation, set to the music of Gustav Mahler, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Maddin's ‘Victorian’ interpretation of Dracula is marked by an emphasis on the turn-of-the-century cultural contexts of the novel (gender, medicine, race, imperialism). The film presents 1890s England as seen through the eyes of a knowledgeable 21st century viewer whose close reading of the source text is shaped by critical discussions of the novel and the Dracula myth in popular culture. Vampirizing various cultural artifacts from Caligari to Coppola, Maddin's palimpsestic film ultimately manages to be both highly original and collage, both – in the words of Jonathan Harker's diary – ‘up-to-date’ and ‘nineteenth century […] with a vengeance’.Less
This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's 2002 film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's dance adaptation, set to the music of Gustav Mahler, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Maddin's ‘Victorian’ interpretation of Dracula is marked by an emphasis on the turn-of-the-century cultural contexts of the novel (gender, medicine, race, imperialism). The film presents 1890s England as seen through the eyes of a knowledgeable 21st century viewer whose close reading of the source text is shaped by critical discussions of the novel and the Dracula myth in popular culture. Vampirizing various cultural artifacts from Caligari to Coppola, Maddin's palimpsestic film ultimately manages to be both highly original and collage, both – in the words of Jonathan Harker's diary – ‘up-to-date’ and ‘nineteenth century […] with a vengeance’.
Tim Youngs
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846319587
- eISBN:
- 9781781380895
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846319587.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, both from 1897. It reads them both as examples of reverse colonisation and draws a connection betwen the titular ...
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This chapter examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, both from 1897. It reads them both as examples of reverse colonisation and draws a connection betwen the titular characters’ shape-changing and the multiple narratives of the texts. The critical roles played by money and animality reflect anxieties about social, physical and moral identities.Less
This chapter examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, both from 1897. It reads them both as examples of reverse colonisation and draws a connection betwen the titular characters’ shape-changing and the multiple narratives of the texts. The critical roles played by money and animality reflect anxieties about social, physical and moral identities.
Patrick Brantlinger
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801450198
- eISBN:
- 9780801462634
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801450198.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the ...
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This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the telegraph and the typewriter. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's science fiction classic The Coming Race appeared in 1872. Victorians, including George Eliot, speculated about machines as a super-race that would one day replace humans. In the machinic throes of vampirism, Bram Stoker's Dracula represents a past in which imperialism and cannibalism were inseparable—a past that he threatens to turn into Britain's future by creating an ever-expanding race of vampires. Universal bloodthirstiness or vampiric cannibalism is the ultimate nightmare version of racial degeneration and also of going native.Less
This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the telegraph and the typewriter. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's science fiction classic The Coming Race appeared in 1872. Victorians, including George Eliot, speculated about machines as a super-race that would one day replace humans. In the machinic throes of vampirism, Bram Stoker's Dracula represents a past in which imperialism and cannibalism were inseparable—a past that he threatens to turn into Britain's future by creating an ever-expanding race of vampires. Universal bloodthirstiness or vampiric cannibalism is the ultimate nightmare version of racial degeneration and also of going native.
Laura Helen Marks
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042140
- eISBN:
- 9780252050886
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042140.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but ...
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This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.Less
This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.
Sophie Duncan
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198790846
- eISBN:
- 9780191833298
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790846.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines Ellen Terry’s performance as Imogen (Cymbeline) at the Lyceum in 1896. It reveals Terry’s performance as Imogen as profoundly implicated in the genesis of Gothic texts including ...
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This chapter examines Ellen Terry’s performance as Imogen (Cymbeline) at the Lyceum in 1896. It reveals Terry’s performance as Imogen as profoundly implicated in the genesis of Gothic texts including Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Using Terry’s interpretation and reception to explore fin-de-siècle views of wifely sexuality, the young bride emerges as a particularly sexualized, little-studied figure in Victorian performance. Actresses negotiated marriage on and offstage, placing their lives, cultural profile, and roles in highly charged conversation. In particular, Terry’s performance as the married princess Imogen contributed to ideas of national character, queenship, and empire as Queen Victoria became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch on the day Terry’s reviews of Imogen were published.Less
This chapter examines Ellen Terry’s performance as Imogen (Cymbeline) at the Lyceum in 1896. It reveals Terry’s performance as Imogen as profoundly implicated in the genesis of Gothic texts including Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Using Terry’s interpretation and reception to explore fin-de-siècle views of wifely sexuality, the young bride emerges as a particularly sexualized, little-studied figure in Victorian performance. Actresses negotiated marriage on and offstage, placing their lives, cultural profile, and roles in highly charged conversation. In particular, Terry’s performance as the married princess Imogen contributed to ideas of national character, queenship, and empire as Queen Victoria became Britain’s longest-reigning monarch on the day Terry’s reviews of Imogen were published.
Mighall Robert
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199262182
- eISBN:
- 9780191698835
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262182.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of ...
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This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of historical time encouraged the emergence of a new breed of Gothic fiction which betrayed a distinct biological and anthropological cast. The chapter explains how the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker provided new locations for the unwelcome past to survive into and threaten the civilized present.Less
This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of historical time encouraged the emergence of a new breed of Gothic fiction which betrayed a distinct biological and anthropological cast. The chapter explains how the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker provided new locations for the unwelcome past to survive into and threaten the civilized present.
James H. Murphy
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199596997
- eISBN:
- 9780191723520
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596997.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture ...
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The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.Less
The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.
Neil Cornwell
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719082092
- eISBN:
- 9781781702062
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719082092.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed ...
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This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.Less
This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.
Seamus Deane
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184904
- eISBN:
- 9780191674389
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184904.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings. ...
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This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and from James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues: national character, conflict between discipline and excess, division between the languages of economics and sensibility, and modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture–its novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, and poems–take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and is an achievement that is only now being fully recognised.Less
This book traces the emergence of a self-consciously national tradition in Irish writing from the era of the French Revolution and, specifically, from Edmund Burke’s counter-revolutionary writings. From Gerald Griffin’s The Collegians to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and from James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy to Synge, Yeats, and Joyce, Irish writing is dominated by a number of inherited issues: national character, conflict between discipline and excess, division between the languages of economics and sensibility, and modernity and backwardness. Almost all the activities of Irish print culture–its novels, songs, historical analyses, typefaces, and poems–take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance. In the process, Ireland created a national literature that was also a colonial one. This was and is an achievement that is only now being fully recognised.
Katherine Mullin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198724841
- eISBN:
- 9780191792342
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198724841.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines how fictions by Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Joyce took telegraphists, then typists, as thrilling new ...
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This chapter examines how fictions by Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Joyce took telegraphists, then typists, as thrilling new heroines of modernity. It argues that their vocational proficiencies prompted imaginative speculations on the extent and uses of professional, emotional, and sexual knowledge. Those speculations were manifest in tensions between clerical and sexual reproduction, in questions of integrity arising from those tensions, and, ultimately, in plots haunted by sexual blackmail. The preoccupation with blackmail is one particularly conspicuous dramatization of the authorial unease typists and telegraphists inspired. These Working Girls could be seen as allegorical doubles for writers struggling with the pressures of originality and creative integrity. They helped to articulate anxieties about textual pollution in fictions often composed under duress, and betraying fretfulness about plagiarism, commercial expedience, and creative exhaustion in both their plots and their form.Less
This chapter examines how fictions by Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Gissing, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and James Joyce took telegraphists, then typists, as thrilling new heroines of modernity. It argues that their vocational proficiencies prompted imaginative speculations on the extent and uses of professional, emotional, and sexual knowledge. Those speculations were manifest in tensions between clerical and sexual reproduction, in questions of integrity arising from those tensions, and, ultimately, in plots haunted by sexual blackmail. The preoccupation with blackmail is one particularly conspicuous dramatization of the authorial unease typists and telegraphists inspired. These Working Girls could be seen as allegorical doubles for writers struggling with the pressures of originality and creative integrity. They helped to articulate anxieties about textual pollution in fictions often composed under duress, and betraying fretfulness about plagiarism, commercial expedience, and creative exhaustion in both their plots and their form.
