Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History PDF Author: Daniel Renshaw
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040308120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history". From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the "historical record" and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London and Baldini’s Mal’aria. Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History PDF Author: Daniel Renshaw
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040308120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history". From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the "historical record" and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London and Baldini’s Mal’aria. Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.

Haunted Property

Haunted Property PDF Author: Sarah Gilbreath Ford
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496829719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Winner of a 2021 South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize 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. Sarah Gilbreath Ford considers how writers in works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to twenty-first-century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Although literary critics have argued that the American gothic is driven by the nation’s history of racial injustice, what is missing in this critical conversation is the key role of property. Ford argues that 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 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 Ford argues that 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, Ford reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession.

American Gothic

American Gothic PDF Author: Jason Haslam
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474401627
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A new critical companion to the Gothic traditions of American CultureThis new Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known texts in literature and film, television, photography, and video games. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Key Features Features original critical writing by established and emerging scholarsSurveys the full range of American Gothic, from its earliest texts to 21st Century worksIncludes critical analyses of American Gothic in new media and technologiesWill establish new benchmarks for the critical understanding of American Gothic traditions

Literature and the Human

Literature and the Human PDF Author: Andy Mousley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134107102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Why does literature matter? What is its human value? Historical approaches to literature have for several decades prevailed over the idea that literary works can deepen our understanding of fundamental questions of existence. This book re-affirms literature's existential value by developing a new critical vocabulary for thinking about literature's human meaningfulness. It puts this vocabulary into practice through close reading of a wide range of texts, from The Second Wakefield Shepherds’ Play to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Individual chapters discuss: Literature’s engagement of the emotions Literature’s humanisation of history Literature’s treatment of universals and particulars The depth of reflection provoked by literary works Literature as a special kind of seeing and framing The question at the heart of the volume, of why literature matters, makes this book relevant to all students and professors of literature.

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History PDF Author: Neil Cocks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032736464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History, made up of contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history".

The Literature of Reconstruction

The Literature of Reconstruction PDF Author: Wolfgang Funk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501306170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Winner of the 2016 ESSE Junior Scholar Book Award in Literatures in the English Language The Literature of Reconstruction argues for the term and concept of 'postmillennial reconstruction' to fill the gap left by the decline of postmodernism and deconstruction as useful cultural and literary categories. Wolfgang Funk shows how this notion emerges from the theoretical and philosophical development that led to the demise of postmodernism by relating it to the idea of 'authenticity': immediate experience that eludes direct representation. In addition, he provides a clear formal framework with which to identify and classify the features of 'reconstructive literature' by updating the narratological category of 'metafiction', originally established in the 1980s. Based on Werner Wolf's observation of a 'metareferential turn' in contemporary arts and media, he illustrates how the specific use of metareference results in a renegotiation of the specific patterns of literary communication and claims that this renegotiation can be profitably described with the concept of 'reconstruction'. To substantiate this claim, in the second half of the book Funk discusses narrative texts that illustrate this transition from postmodern deconstruction to postmillennial reconstruction. The analyses take in distinguished and prize-winning writers such as Dave Eggers, Julian Barnes, Jennifer Egan and Jasper Fforde. The broad scope of authors, featuring writers from the US as well as the UK, underlines the fact that the reconstructive tendencies and strategies Funk diagnoses are of universal significance for the intellectual and cultural self-image of the global North.

Reading Reconstruction

Reading Reconstruction PDF Author: Kathryn B. McKee
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner’s writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout the late nineteenth century. Reading Reconstruction begins by tracing the historical contexts that defined Bonner’s life in postwar Holly Springs. McKee explores how questions of race, gender, and national citizenship permeated Bonner’s social milieu and provided subject matter for her literary works. Examining Bonner’s writing across multiple genres, McKee finds that the author’s wry but dark humor satirizes the foibles and inconsistencies of southern culture. Bonner’s travel letters, first from Boston and then from the capitals of Europe, show her both embracing and performing her role as a southern woman, before coming to see herself as simply “American” when abroad. Like unto Like, the single novel she published in her lifetime, directly engages with Mississippi’s postbellum political life, especially its racial violence and the rise of Lost Cause ideology. Her two short story collections, including the raucously comic pieces in Dialect Tales and the more nostalgic Suwanee River Tales, indicate her consistent absorption in the debates of her time, as she ponders shifting definitions of citizenship, questions the evolving rhetoric of postwar reconciliation, and readily employs humor to disrupt conventional domestic scenarios and gender roles. In the end, Bonner’s writing offers a telling index of the paradoxes and irresolution of the period, advocating for a feminist reinterpretation of traditional gender hierarchies, but verging only reluctantly on the questions of racial equality that nonetheless unsettle her plots. By challenging traditional readings of postbellum southern literature, McKee offers a long-overdue reassessment of Sherwood Bonner’s place in American literary history.

Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature

Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature PDF Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438109113
Category : Gothic revival (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with Gothic literature.

Cyclpoedia of universal History: Volume II - Part I The Modern World

Cyclpoedia of universal History: Volume II - Part I The Modern World PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 788

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Book Description


The Gothic and death

The Gothic and death PDF Author: Carol Davison
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526107929
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Gothic and death offers the first ever published study devoted to the subject of the Gothic and death across the centuries. It investigates how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning and memorialisation ('the Death Question') - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in such fields as Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known. This area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms such as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction and Bollywood film noir.