Carl Sagan
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195310726
- eISBN:
- 9780199785179
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195310726.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Carl Sagan is a public intellectual and the best-selling author of Cosmos, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human ...
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Carl Sagan is a public intellectual and the best-selling author of Cosmos, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, and many other books. His science fiction novel, Contact, was made into a popular, major motion picture in 1997. Sagan is well known for his interests in extra-terrestrial life and is closely linked to the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). As a scientist, Sagan educated the public about “Nuclear Winter”, the idea that a nuclear war could precipitate an unprecedented ice age that might render the Earth largely uninhabitable. Sagan became notorious in certain circles for his forays into religion, which he viewed with skepticism.Less
Carl Sagan is a public intellectual and the best-selling author of Cosmos, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, and many other books. His science fiction novel, Contact, was made into a popular, major motion picture in 1997. Sagan is well known for his interests in extra-terrestrial life and is closely linked to the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). As a scientist, Sagan educated the public about “Nuclear Winter”, the idea that a nuclear war could precipitate an unprecedented ice age that might render the Earth largely uninhabitable. Sagan became notorious in certain circles for his forays into religion, which he viewed with skepticism.
Neil Websdale
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195315417
- eISBN:
- 9780199777464
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195315417.001.0001
- Subject:
- Social Work, Children and Families, Crime and Justice
Familicide involves the killing of a current or former spouse or partner and one or more of their children, followed, in many cases, by the suicide of the perpetrator. These killings are limited to ...
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Familicide involves the killing of a current or former spouse or partner and one or more of their children, followed, in many cases, by the suicide of the perpetrator. These killings are limited to the modern era and seem to be on the rise in late modern times, deeply disturbing the communities in which they occur. Familicidal Hearts explores the emotional styles of 196 male and 15 female perpetrators of this shocking offence, situating their emotional styles on a continuum with livid coercive killers at one end and civil reputable murderers at the other. The analysis identifies the pivotal roles of socially situated emotions such as shame, rage, fear, anxiety, and depression in the lives of perpetrators and in particular the way perpetrators mismanage these emotions, fail to acknowledge or recognize them, and mask them. The author identifies modern era figurations of feeling and familial atmospheres of feeling as being conducive to the rise of familicide. In particular, most perpetrators see themselves as failing to live up to the demands of modern era gender expectations, as fathers, lovers, and, much more rarely, as wives or mothers. In spite of the plethora of case details used, the author contends that at some level, familicides are inexplicable and reflect the haunting effects of modern emotional formations that defy scientific analysis.Less
Familicide involves the killing of a current or former spouse or partner and one or more of their children, followed, in many cases, by the suicide of the perpetrator. These killings are limited to the modern era and seem to be on the rise in late modern times, deeply disturbing the communities in which they occur. Familicidal Hearts explores the emotional styles of 196 male and 15 female perpetrators of this shocking offence, situating their emotional styles on a continuum with livid coercive killers at one end and civil reputable murderers at the other. The analysis identifies the pivotal roles of socially situated emotions such as shame, rage, fear, anxiety, and depression in the lives of perpetrators and in particular the way perpetrators mismanage these emotions, fail to acknowledge or recognize them, and mask them. The author identifies modern era figurations of feeling and familial atmospheres of feeling as being conducive to the rise of familicide. In particular, most perpetrators see themselves as failing to live up to the demands of modern era gender expectations, as fathers, lovers, and, much more rarely, as wives or mothers. In spite of the plethora of case details used, the author contends that at some level, familicides are inexplicable and reflect the haunting effects of modern emotional formations that defy scientific analysis.
Neil Websdale
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195315417
- eISBN:
- 9780199777464
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195315417.003.002
- Subject:
- Social Work, Children and Families, Crime and Justice
Drawing upon the work of Antonio Damasio, Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman, Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Raymond Williams, the author develops the notion of emotional styles as a ...
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Drawing upon the work of Antonio Damasio, Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman, Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Raymond Williams, the author develops the notion of emotional styles as a means of addressing the continuities between the visceral, the psychological, the social, and the historical. Using Avery Gordon's language of ghosts and haunting as a metaphorical device, the author sees familicide as an uncanny act, an outcome of the highly charged interplay between emotional styles, familial atmospheres of feeling, and broader-ranging figurations of feeling emergent in modern life. Through the analysis of two cases, the author introduces the idea that offenders are socially disconnected, lacking a sense of place, even in the midst of family life and broader social interdependencies. Familicidal hearts are therefore haunted hearts, souls forged out of the anomic and alienating conditions of modern life.Less
Drawing upon the work of Antonio Damasio, Norbert Elias, Erving Goffman, Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, and Raymond Williams, the author develops the notion of emotional styles as a means of addressing the continuities between the visceral, the psychological, the social, and the historical. Using Avery Gordon's language of ghosts and haunting as a metaphorical device, the author sees familicide as an uncanny act, an outcome of the highly charged interplay between emotional styles, familial atmospheres of feeling, and broader-ranging figurations of feeling emergent in modern life. Through the analysis of two cases, the author introduces the idea that offenders are socially disconnected, lacking a sense of place, even in the midst of family life and broader social interdependencies. Familicidal hearts are therefore haunted hearts, souls forged out of the anomic and alienating conditions of modern life.
Sarah Gilbreath Ford
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781496829696
- eISBN:
- 9781496829740
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496829696.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a ...
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At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. This book considers how writers in works from 19th slave narratives to 21st century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Out of all of slavery’s perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all of the other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, this study reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession. The book thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Instead, gothic tales of slavery are the very distillation of the anxieties about race and property located in the larger American literary tradition.Less
At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. This book considers how writers in works from 19th slave narratives to 21st century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Out of all of slavery’s perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all of the other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, this study reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession. The book thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Instead, gothic tales of slavery are the very distillation of the anxieties about race and property located in the larger American literary tradition.
B. W. Young
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199256228
- eISBN:
- 9780191719660
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256228.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension ...
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This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.Less
This chapter strengthens the important claim made by the literary critic Terry Castle, who has argued for the need for modern scholars properly to appreciate a vitally important ‘spectral’ dimension in what she describes as Leslie Stephen's otherwise all too rational 18th century. Even though she respects the impetus behind W. E. H. Lecky's progressively rationalizing thesis in his History of the Rise and Progress of Rationalism in Europe (1865), she has offered her own richly suggestive series of discrete genealogies that account for the survival of the uncanny into the 19th century and rightly make much of its continuing power. This chapter, therefore, takes the form of an archaeology of the haunting sense of the 18th-century past in the 19th-century present. Haunting is both a reality and a metaphor in Vernon Lee, and the 18th century was an important factor in this experience of haunting, as it was also to prove to be for M. R. James.
J. Samaine Lockwood
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625362
- eISBN:
- 9781469625386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625362.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature
This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the ...
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This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.Less
This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.
Kevin J. Wetmore
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800859265
- eISBN:
- 9781800852341
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800859265.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
James Wan’s 2013 film The Conjuring appears on many critics’ best horror films of the decade lists and was rated R by the MPAA solely “for terror.” Allegedly based on the true story of the Perron ...
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James Wan’s 2013 film The Conjuring appears on many critics’ best horror films of the decade lists and was rated R by the MPAA solely “for terror.” Allegedly based on the true story of the Perron family’s experiences in a haunted farmhouse in rural Rhode Island, the film comes from the files of pioneer paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, and tells the story of how the Perron family came under supernatural assault from Bathsheba Sherman, a demonic eighteenth century witch, and how the Warrens investigated and eventually exorcised her. The book examines how Wan created the paragon of virtuosic, effective, terrifying haunted house movies, and then goes on to consider how the film plays with the idea of “a true story,” the role of religion in the film, how children’s games and toys are made the source of adult terror, how The Conjuring is a female-centered but not feminist film, and how the film spawned the “Conjuring Universe,” a growing series of half a dozen sequels, prequels, and related films. The Conjuring is an effective, good, old-fashioned horror film. It is genuinely scary and anxiety-inducing, greater than the sum of its parts and it is greater than its marketing campaign of “based on a true story” would seem to suggest. The book analyses the film on multiple levels and contextualizes it as a twenty-first century horror classic.Less
James Wan’s 2013 film The Conjuring appears on many critics’ best horror films of the decade lists and was rated R by the MPAA solely “for terror.” Allegedly based on the true story of the Perron family’s experiences in a haunted farmhouse in rural Rhode Island, the film comes from the files of pioneer paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, and tells the story of how the Perron family came under supernatural assault from Bathsheba Sherman, a demonic eighteenth century witch, and how the Warrens investigated and eventually exorcised her. The book examines how Wan created the paragon of virtuosic, effective, terrifying haunted house movies, and then goes on to consider how the film plays with the idea of “a true story,” the role of religion in the film, how children’s games and toys are made the source of adult terror, how The Conjuring is a female-centered but not feminist film, and how the film spawned the “Conjuring Universe,” a growing series of half a dozen sequels, prequels, and related films. The Conjuring is an effective, good, old-fashioned horror film. It is genuinely scary and anxiety-inducing, greater than the sum of its parts and it is greater than its marketing campaign of “based on a true story” would seem to suggest. The book analyses the film on multiple levels and contextualizes it as a twenty-first century horror classic.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their ...
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This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.Less
This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.
Timothy Chesters
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199599806
- eISBN:
- 9780191723537
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599806.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) ...
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Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. And yet although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. This book describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the ‘haunted house’, the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures (Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné) as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, the book sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.Less
Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. And yet although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. This book describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the ‘haunted house’, the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures (Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné) as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, the book sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.
Sara Brandellero
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199589524
- eISBN:
- 9780191595462
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589524.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book studies the work of João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-99), one of Brazil's foremost poets of the 20th century and a unique voice within Brazilian Modernism. It concentrates on the poet's later ...
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This book studies the work of João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-99), one of Brazil's foremost poets of the 20th century and a unique voice within Brazilian Modernism. It concentrates on the poet's later works, from A escola das facas (1980) to Andando Sevilha (1990), with the aim to provide an overview of a body of work which has so far attracted limited critical attention. In so doing, it also proposes a review of traditional readings of Cabral as a poet of clarity and precision, in order to demonstrate how ambiguity in language, imagery, and even structure was an integral part of his writing and contributed to the political impact of his work. The blurring of the opposition between life and death through the image of the knife-edge, central to the first of the works examined, provides a productive starting point for the analysis of the role of the in-between space, (or ‘entre-lugar’, as defined by Silviano Santiago) in his writing. Thus, this book discusses Cabral's postcolonial perspective, as in his dialogue with poetic tradition at home and abroad, and considers how, through his resistance to rigid categorizations, such as in representations of gender, and thematic exploration of grey areas such as haunting, unsolvable crimes, or even the labyrinthine geography of Seville, Cabral sought to unmask the inequities of Brazil's past and the challenges of its present.Less
This book studies the work of João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-99), one of Brazil's foremost poets of the 20th century and a unique voice within Brazilian Modernism. It concentrates on the poet's later works, from A escola das facas (1980) to Andando Sevilha (1990), with the aim to provide an overview of a body of work which has so far attracted limited critical attention. In so doing, it also proposes a review of traditional readings of Cabral as a poet of clarity and precision, in order to demonstrate how ambiguity in language, imagery, and even structure was an integral part of his writing and contributed to the political impact of his work. The blurring of the opposition between life and death through the image of the knife-edge, central to the first of the works examined, provides a productive starting point for the analysis of the role of the in-between space, (or ‘entre-lugar’, as defined by Silviano Santiago) in his writing. Thus, this book discusses Cabral's postcolonial perspective, as in his dialogue with poetic tradition at home and abroad, and considers how, through his resistance to rigid categorizations, such as in representations of gender, and thematic exploration of grey areas such as haunting, unsolvable crimes, or even the labyrinthine geography of Seville, Cabral sought to unmask the inequities of Brazil's past and the challenges of its present.
Sara Brandellero
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199589524
- eISBN:
- 9780191595462
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589524.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter studies João Cabral's fascination with liminal states in Auto do frade (1984). In this play, only the second in his career, Cabral develops the historical concerns he raised in the ...
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This chapter studies João Cabral's fascination with liminal states in Auto do frade (1984). In this play, only the second in his career, Cabral develops the historical concerns he raised in the earlier A escola das facas. He deals with issues of political oppression by focusing on the hours preceding the execution of Frei Caneca (1779-1825), one of the heroes of North-East Brazil's struggle for independence and a fierce advocate of democracy. The chapter discusses how the experience of haunting conveys the plight of those condemned to live under the despotic rule of Emperor D. Pedro I, of which Frei Caneca is the most prominent victim. The use to which Cabral puts historical themes is extremely topical, given the social and political background against which he was writing, that of Brazil's gradual return to democracy after twenty years of military dictatorship. On a meta-textual level, the chapter discusses how Cabral interweaves the voice of Frei Caneca with his own, thereby paradoxically revising his poetic ideal of precision, as set out in his early work, through the voice of this eminent scholar in exact sciences.Less
This chapter studies João Cabral's fascination with liminal states in Auto do frade (1984). In this play, only the second in his career, Cabral develops the historical concerns he raised in the earlier A escola das facas. He deals with issues of political oppression by focusing on the hours preceding the execution of Frei Caneca (1779-1825), one of the heroes of North-East Brazil's struggle for independence and a fierce advocate of democracy. The chapter discusses how the experience of haunting conveys the plight of those condemned to live under the despotic rule of Emperor D. Pedro I, of which Frei Caneca is the most prominent victim. The use to which Cabral puts historical themes is extremely topical, given the social and political background against which he was writing, that of Brazil's gradual return to democracy after twenty years of military dictatorship. On a meta-textual level, the chapter discusses how Cabral interweaves the voice of Frei Caneca with his own, thereby paradoxically revising his poetic ideal of precision, as set out in his early work, through the voice of this eminent scholar in exact sciences.
Patrick Deer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199239887
- eISBN:
- 9780191716782
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239887.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter 4 examines wartime writers' challenges to official projections of an “island fortress” under siege at the heart of a loyal, but distant empire. During a wartime revival of popular ...
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Chapter 4 examines wartime writers' challenges to official projections of an “island fortress” under siege at the heart of a loyal, but distant empire. During a wartime revival of popular imperialism, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen excavated buried histories of empire, representing the home front as a hallucinatory, haunted space. The chapter explores their secret war work as agents in British intelligence and their ironic representations of the corrosive effects of wartime surveillance, secrecy and espionage. In the dislocated perspectives offered by unpatriotic, transgressive figures like the spy, the spiv, the wounded veteran, the adulterous wife, or the rootless “mobile” woman conscripted into the war effort Bowen and Greene turn a sceptical eye on the mythology of “Deep England” and the “People's War.” Their work reveals that the island fortress was constituted by the contradictory relations between an insular Englishness, an expansive British imperial identity, and cosmopolitan traditions of anti-colonialism.Less
Chapter 4 examines wartime writers' challenges to official projections of an “island fortress” under siege at the heart of a loyal, but distant empire. During a wartime revival of popular imperialism, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen excavated buried histories of empire, representing the home front as a hallucinatory, haunted space. The chapter explores their secret war work as agents in British intelligence and their ironic representations of the corrosive effects of wartime surveillance, secrecy and espionage. In the dislocated perspectives offered by unpatriotic, transgressive figures like the spy, the spiv, the wounded veteran, the adulterous wife, or the rootless “mobile” woman conscripted into the war effort Bowen and Greene turn a sceptical eye on the mythology of “Deep England” and the “People's War.” Their work reveals that the island fortress was constituted by the contradictory relations between an insular Englishness, an expansive British imperial identity, and cosmopolitan traditions of anti-colonialism.
Brittany Powell Kennedy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461978
- eISBN:
- 9781626744943
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461978.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on this struggle to perform a coded national exceptionality as main characters in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte attempt ...
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This chapter focuses on this struggle to perform a coded national exceptionality as main characters in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte attempt to reconcile a past haunted by civil war. Their main characters’ melancholic relationship with that past weaves a path toward self destruction that allows Faulkner and Cela to expose Spain’s and the South’s own inability to “let go” of its own “traditional” past as defended in each one’s Civil War.Less
This chapter focuses on this struggle to perform a coded national exceptionality as main characters in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte attempt to reconcile a past haunted by civil war. Their main characters’ melancholic relationship with that past weaves a path toward self destruction that allows Faulkner and Cela to expose Spain’s and the South’s own inability to “let go” of its own “traditional” past as defended in each one’s Civil War.
Willard Spiegelman
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195332926
- eISBN:
- 9780199851294
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332926.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Presenting John Ashbery as a landscape poet, or a descriptive one, casts light on a sizable proportion of his poetry—even if only parts rather than wholes, let alone volumes. A panorama of visual ...
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Presenting John Ashbery as a landscape poet, or a descriptive one, casts light on a sizable proportion of his poetry—even if only parts rather than wholes, let alone volumes. A panorama of visual details overwhelms Ashbery's poems and his speakers, sometimes charming them, sometimes depressing them. Time, consciousness, and landscape are his primary subjects. He is a poet nostalgic for space as well as time. This chapter examines his poem, “Haunted Landscape,” where everything changes before the readers' eyes: the poem ends with a haunted house, before which it has presented an abandoned mountain landscape and a farming scene somewhere down South. The poem extends from pastoral to georgic to domestic gestures.Less
Presenting John Ashbery as a landscape poet, or a descriptive one, casts light on a sizable proportion of his poetry—even if only parts rather than wholes, let alone volumes. A panorama of visual details overwhelms Ashbery's poems and his speakers, sometimes charming them, sometimes depressing them. Time, consciousness, and landscape are his primary subjects. He is a poet nostalgic for space as well as time. This chapter examines his poem, “Haunted Landscape,” where everything changes before the readers' eyes: the poem ends with a haunted house, before which it has presented an abandoned mountain landscape and a farming scene somewhere down South. The poem extends from pastoral to georgic to domestic gestures.
Timothy Chesters
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199599806
- eISBN:
- 9780191723537
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599806.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
The first part of this chapter is devoted to Ludwig Lavater's Von Gespaenstern, a treatise on ghosts which became enormously influential in France following its translation into French (1571). A ...
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The first part of this chapter is devoted to Ludwig Lavater's Von Gespaenstern, a treatise on ghosts which became enormously influential in France following its translation into French (1571). A detailed account is provided of the life and career of the author, of the strategy of his first publishers, and of the text itself. An example of what might be termed ‘pastoral demonology’, Lavater's text sets out above all to wrest control of lay spiritual experience from the priestly prerogative of discretio spirituum. It is argued that out of this attempt emerges, for the first time in European culture, that narrative category now recognisable as the ‘haunted house’. The second part of the chapter is devoted to Noël Taillepied's reply to Lavater, the Psichologie, ou trois livres de l'apparition des esprits (1588). Taillepied's curious plagiarism of Lavater suggests in the end that the two opponents may have more in common than they think.Less
The first part of this chapter is devoted to Ludwig Lavater's Von Gespaenstern, a treatise on ghosts which became enormously influential in France following its translation into French (1571). A detailed account is provided of the life and career of the author, of the strategy of his first publishers, and of the text itself. An example of what might be termed ‘pastoral demonology’, Lavater's text sets out above all to wrest control of lay spiritual experience from the priestly prerogative of discretio spirituum. It is argued that out of this attempt emerges, for the first time in European culture, that narrative category now recognisable as the ‘haunted house’. The second part of the chapter is devoted to Noël Taillepied's reply to Lavater, the Psichologie, ou trois livres de l'apparition des esprits (1588). Taillepied's curious plagiarism of Lavater suggests in the end that the two opponents may have more in common than they think.
Timothy Chesters
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199599806
- eISBN:
- 9780191723537
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599806.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
The book's conclusion reviews the material considered in early chapters through the prism of a passage in Montaigne's ‘Des boiteux’. In it Montaigne pauses suddenly to consider, in astonishment, his ...
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The book's conclusion reviews the material considered in early chapters through the prism of a passage in Montaigne's ‘Des boiteux’. In it Montaigne pauses suddenly to consider, in astonishment, his own ghostliness: ‘Plus je me hante et me connois, […] moins je m'entens en moy’. The implications of this remark are drawn out with reference to a further passage in which Montaigne narrates the story of a ghost hoax which almost convinced the inhabitants of a neighbouring village. Such is our taste for marvels, he claims, that the truth evaporates in our ardour for a story. The final section briefly reviews the continuing taste for ghost stories in seventeenth-century France.Less
The book's conclusion reviews the material considered in early chapters through the prism of a passage in Montaigne's ‘Des boiteux’. In it Montaigne pauses suddenly to consider, in astonishment, his own ghostliness: ‘Plus je me hante et me connois, […] moins je m'entens en moy’. The implications of this remark are drawn out with reference to a further passage in which Montaigne narrates the story of a ghost hoax which almost convinced the inhabitants of a neighbouring village. Such is our taste for marvels, he claims, that the truth evaporates in our ardour for a story. The final section briefly reviews the continuing taste for ghost stories in seventeenth-century France.
Marisa C. Hayes
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781911325291
- eISBN:
- 9781800342255
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325291.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This concluding chapter highlights how, despite the mixed critical reception it received outside Japan initially, Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) went on to become a founding pillar of the contemporary ...
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This concluding chapter highlights how, despite the mixed critical reception it received outside Japan initially, Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) went on to become a founding pillar of the contemporary J-horror movement as both a successful domestic product and a popular international export. Alongside the Ringu films, it inspired new explorations of haunted technology and cyclical violence, while establishing a familiar look for the female Japanese ghost that international audiences would come to recognise instantly. Indeed, the characters of Kayako and Toshio would also become horror icons in their own right. At the turn of the millennium, Takashi Shimizu offered audiences a lasting glimpse of psychological hauntings, old as time yet packaged in the form of contemporary troubles and very real household devices. Although aided by Japan's lore of the supernatural and the country's rich array of performing arts, it is Shimizu's mastery of sound and virtuosic camera movements that creates an architectural odyssey within the horrors of the home and other intimate spaces.Less
This concluding chapter highlights how, despite the mixed critical reception it received outside Japan initially, Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) went on to become a founding pillar of the contemporary J-horror movement as both a successful domestic product and a popular international export. Alongside the Ringu films, it inspired new explorations of haunted technology and cyclical violence, while establishing a familiar look for the female Japanese ghost that international audiences would come to recognise instantly. Indeed, the characters of Kayako and Toshio would also become horror icons in their own right. At the turn of the millennium, Takashi Shimizu offered audiences a lasting glimpse of psychological hauntings, old as time yet packaged in the form of contemporary troubles and very real household devices. Although aided by Japan's lore of the supernatural and the country's rich array of performing arts, it is Shimizu's mastery of sound and virtuosic camera movements that creates an architectural odyssey within the horrors of the home and other intimate spaces.
Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089770
- eISBN:
- 9781781708651
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089770.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new ...
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Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new media) from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Placing Gothic forms and productions in an explicitly interdisciplinary context, it investigates how the engagement with technologies drives the dissemination of Gothic across diverse media through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while conjuring all kinds of haunting and spectral presences that trouble cultural narratives of progress and technological advancement.Less
Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects explores Gothic, monstrosity, spectrality and media forms and technologies (music, fiction's engagements with photography/ cinema, film, magic practice and new media) from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Placing Gothic forms and productions in an explicitly interdisciplinary context, it investigates how the engagement with technologies drives the dissemination of Gothic across diverse media through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while conjuring all kinds of haunting and spectral presences that trouble cultural narratives of progress and technological advancement.
Frank Noack
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813167008
- eISBN:
- 9780813167794
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813167008.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter deals with Veit Harlan’s family background, the Harlans having French Huguenot roots. Walter Harlan, Veit Harlan’s father, comes from an upper-class family and is supposed to follow in ...
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This chapter deals with Veit Harlan’s family background, the Harlans having French Huguenot roots. Walter Harlan, Veit Harlan’s father, comes from an upper-class family and is supposed to follow in his banker-lawyer father’s footsteps when he quits his own law studies in order to become a poet. Adele Harlan, Veit Harlan’s mother, is the illegitimate child of a chambermaid named Rebecca Boothby, who was possibly Jewish, and an unknown father who was possibly Gypsy. The first two children by Walter and Adele Harlan are illegitimate themselves. To the young Veit Harlan, his parents’ ethnical origins are less important than the social ones. As a filmmaker, he will repeatedly portray young women who are haunted by their past and whose unhappy and poor mother died young. Despite his solid income, Walter Harlan suffers from a lack of recognition as an artist.Less
This chapter deals with Veit Harlan’s family background, the Harlans having French Huguenot roots. Walter Harlan, Veit Harlan’s father, comes from an upper-class family and is supposed to follow in his banker-lawyer father’s footsteps when he quits his own law studies in order to become a poet. Adele Harlan, Veit Harlan’s mother, is the illegitimate child of a chambermaid named Rebecca Boothby, who was possibly Jewish, and an unknown father who was possibly Gypsy. The first two children by Walter and Adele Harlan are illegitimate themselves. To the young Veit Harlan, his parents’ ethnical origins are less important than the social ones. As a filmmaker, he will repeatedly portray young women who are haunted by their past and whose unhappy and poor mother died young. Despite his solid income, Walter Harlan suffers from a lack of recognition as an artist.
Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474402194
- eISBN:
- 9781474422260
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402194.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. The essays collected in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches demonstrate Rhys’s centrality to modernism and ...
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Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. The essays collected in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches demonstrate Rhys’s centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities. Strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble critical categories and easy conceptualisations of the periods her work spans.Less
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. The essays collected in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches demonstrate Rhys’s centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities. Strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble critical categories and easy conceptualisations of the periods her work spans.
