Archives par mot-clé : gothic

Parution : The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic

Clive Bloom, The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, Palgrave Macmilan, 2021. 

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, ‘hauntology’ and much more. ‘Horror’, as Poe teaches us, ‘is the soul of the plot’.  

Clive Bloom is Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University, UK. He has written numerous books on popular literature, gothic fiction, history and politics. He is a broadcaster and occasional journalist who has been quoted in both the Washington Post and Pravda and has an entry in the Columbia Book of World Quotations.

Appel à contributions : Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Edited Collection

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Edited Collection, Call for Papers

Famed for their scandalous content and supposed pernicious influence on a young readership, it is little wonder why the Victorian penny dreadful was derided by critics and, in many cases, censored or banned. These serialised texts, published between the 1830s until their eventual decline in the 1860s, were enormously popular, particularly with working-class readers. As Judith Flanders has highlighted in The Invention of Murder(2011), for every publisher of “respectable fiction”, there were ten for penny fiction. However, despite their evidential popularity, these texts have fallen into obscurity; this could be accounted for perhaps due to their ephemeral nature with many titles being lost or incomplete, alternatively this could be the effects of literary criticisms from writers such as Charles Dickens and James Greenwood overspilling into contemporary scholarship. Neglecting these texts from Gothic literary criticism creates a vacuum of working-class Gothic texts which have, in many cases, cultural, literary and socio-political significance. This collection aims to redress this imbalance and critically assess these crucial works of literature.

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Victorian Encounters and Environments

12th Annual VPFA Conference
‘Victorian Encounters and Environments’
15-17th July 2020
University of Greenwich, London

 

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association is dedicated to fostering interest in understudied popular writers, literary genres and other cultural forms, and to facilitating the production of publishable research and academic collaborations amongst scholars of the popular.

We invite a broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretation on the topic of ‘Victorian Encounters and Environments’ and its relation to any aspect of Victorian popular literature and culture which addresses literal or metaphorical representations of the theme. Inter- and multidisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers which address poetry, drama, global literature, non-fiction, visual arts, historical and social contexts. Papers addressing works from the “long Victorian period” (i.e. before 1837 and after 1901) are also welcome.

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