The Gothic Ideology

The Gothic Ideology PDF Author: Diane Long Hoeveler
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783160497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.

The Gothic Ideology

The Gothic Ideology PDF Author: Diane Long Hoeveler
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783160497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.

The Contested Castle

The Contested Castle PDF Author: Kate Ferguson Ellis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252060489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The Gothic novel emerged out of the romantic mist alongside a new conception of the home as a separate sphere for women. Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture--the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic--and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place. Linking terror -- the most important ingredient of the Gothic novel -- to acts of transgression, Ellis shows how houses in Gothic fiction imprison those inside them, while those locked outside wander the earth plotting their return and their revenge.

The Gothic Idol

The Gothic Idol PDF Author: Michael Camille
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521340403
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
By examining the theme of idol-worship in medieval art, this book reveals the ideological basis of paintings, statues, and manuscript illuminations that depict the worship of false gods in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By showing that images of idolatry stood for those outside the Church - pagans, Muslims, Jews, heretics, homosexuals - Camille sheds new light on how medieval society viewed both alien 'others' and itself. He links the abhorrence of worshipping false gods in images to an 'image-explosion' in the thirteenth century when the Christian Church was filled with cult statues, miracle-working relics, and 'real' representations in the new Gothic style. In attempting to bring the Gothic image to life, Camille shows how images can teach us about attitudes and beliefs in a particular society.

Evangelical Gothic

Evangelical Gothic PDF Author: Christopher Herbert
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813943418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic–with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.

Gothic Feminism

Gothic Feminism PDF Author: Diane Long Hoeveler
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271040971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
As British women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought to define how they experienced their era's social and economic upheaval, they helped popularize a new style of bourgeois female sensibility. Building on her earlier work in Romantic Androgyny, Diane Long Hoeveler now examines the Gothic novels of Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Bront&ës to show how these writers helped define femininity for women of the British middle class. Hoeveler argues that a female-created literary ideology, now known as &"victim feminism,&" arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. These novels were thinly disguised efforts at propagandizing a new form of conduct for women, teaching that &"professional femininity&"&—a cultivated pose of wise passiveness and controlled emotions&—best prepared them for social survival. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how these writers constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters&—and readers&—fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system. Gothic Feminism takes a neo-feminist approach to these women's writings, treating them not as sacred texts but as thesis-driven works that attempted to instruct women in a series of strategic poses. It offers both a new understanding of the genre and a wholly new interpretation of feminism as a literary ideology.

The Gothic Other

The Gothic Other PDF Author: Ruth Bienstock Anolik
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786427108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Literary use of the Gothic is marked by an anxious encounter with otherness, with the dark and mysterious unknown. From its earliest manifestations in the turbulent eighteenth century, this seemingly escapist mode has provided for authors a useful ground upon which to safely confront very real fears and horrors. The essays here examine texts in which Gothic fear is relocated onto the figure of the racial and social Other, the Other who replaces the supernatural ghost or grotesque monster as the code for mystery and danger, ultimately becoming as horrifying, threatening and unknowable as the typical Gothic manifestation. The range of essays reveals that writers from many canons and cultures are attracted to the Gothic as a ready medium for expression of racial and social anxieties. The essays are grouped into sections that focus on such topics as race, religion, class, and centers of power.

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral

The Idea of the Gothic Cathedral PDF Author: Stephanie Glaser
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503568133
Category : Architecture, Gothic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Central to many medieval ritual traditions both sacred and secular, the Gothic cathedral holds a privileged place within the European cultural imagination and experience. Due to the burgeoning historical interest in the medieval past, in connection with the medieval revival in literature, visual arts, and architecture that began in the late seventeenth century and culminated in the nineteenth, the Gothic cathedral took centre stage in numerous ideological discourses. These discourses imposed contemporary political and aesthetic connotations upon the cathedral that were often far removed from its original meaning and ritual use. This volume presents interdisciplinary perspectives on the resignification of the Gothic cathedral in the post-medieval period. Its contributors, literary scholars and historians of art and architecture, investigate the dynamics of national and cultural movements that turned Gothic cathedrals into symbols of the modern nation-state, highlight the political uses of the edifice in literature and the arts, and underscore the importance of subjectivity in literary and visual representations of Gothic architecture. Contributing to scholarship in historiography, cultural history, intermedial and interdisciplinary studies, as well as traditional disciplines, the volume resonates with wider perspectives, especially relating to the reuse of artefacts to serve particular ideological ends.

The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction

The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Nick Groom
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191642398
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Gothic is wildly diverse. It can refer to ecclesiastical architecture, supernatural fiction, cult horror films, and a distinctive style of rock music. It has influenced political theorists and social reformers, as well as Victorian home décor and contemporary fashion. Nick Groom shows how the Gothic has come to encompass so many meanings by telling the story of the Gothic from the ancient tribe who sacked Rome to the alternative subculture of the present day. This unique Very Short Introduction reveals that the Gothic has predominantly been a way of understanding and responding to the past. Time after time, the Gothic has been invoked in order to reveal what lies behind conventional history. It is a way of disclosing secrets, whether in the constitutional politics of seventeenth-century England or the racial politics of the United States. While contexts change, the Gothic perpetually regards the past with fascination, both yearning and horrified. It reminds us that neither societies nor individuals can escape the consequences of their actions. The anatomy of the Gothic is richly complex and perversely contradictory, and so the thirteen chapters here range deliberately widely. This is the first time that the entire story of the Gothic has been written as a continuous history: from the historians of late antiquity to the gardens of Georgian England, from the mediaeval cult of the macabre to German Expressionist cinema, from Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy to American consumer society, from folk ballads to vampires, from the past to the present. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

God and the Gothic

God and the Gothic PDF Author: Alison Milbank
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198824467
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Alison Milbank provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities.

The Visible Text

The Visible Text PDF Author: Thomas A. Bredehoft
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191002453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Covering materials ranging from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and inscribed objects to contemporary comics, The Visible Text rewrites the history of textual media and technologies. Arguing that media are not defined by technologies alone, but by a combination of technologies and the ideas that people hold about those technologies, Bredehoft identifies four distinct periods or domains in the history of English literature that correspond to four ways in which media ideologies interacted with the two basic defining technologies of manuscripts and printed books. Examining two complementary ways of defining texts (as subject to a reproductive medium, on the one hand, and as surrounded and defined by paratexts, on the other), The Visible Text points out how Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and contemporary comics share a remarkable similarity in being structured as productions rather than reproductions. Contrastingly, the late-medieval and print-era periods share a cultural investment in textual reproduction, but they differ both in their characteristic technologies and in how they conceptualize the object of reproduction itself. A final epilogue, briefly considering the nature of electronically-mediated textuality, highlights the importance of understanding the history addressed here, as electonic text both parallels and departs from typographic print in ways that earlier reproductive domains clarify and complicate. Filled with concrete examples of both books and texts, The Visible Text will be of interest to readers in the fields of literature, book history, literary theory, media studies, and visual culture.