Art of darkness : a poetics of Gothic
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Bibliographic Information
Art of darkness : a poetics of Gothic
University of Chicago Press, 1995
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. 285-300
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This text aims to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama and verse - including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto", Shelley's "Frankenstein", Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Freud's "The Mysteries of Enlightenment", Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is poetic, not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions - Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition. Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions, such as the haunted castle and the family curse, signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions. In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible.
By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments Introduction: Gothic Fiction's Family Romances 1: The Nightmare of History: Acting On and Acting Out 2: The House of Bluebeard: Gothic Engineering 3: Pope as Gothic "Novelist": Eloisa to Abelard 4: Symbolization and Its Discontents 5: The Nature of Gothic 6: Family Plots 7: Nightmere's Milk: The Male and Female Formulas 8: Male Gothic: Si(g)ns of the Fathers 9: Demon Lovers: The Monk 10: Why Are Vampires Afraid of Garlic?: Dracula 11: The Female Plot of Gothic Fiction 12: The Male as "Other" 13: The Fiction of Feminine Desires: Not the Mirror but the Lamp 14: The Eighteenth-Century Psyche: The Mysteries of Udolpho 15: Dispelling the Name of the Father 16: An "I" for an Eye: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 17: "Frost at Midnight": (M)others and Other Strangers 18: Keats and the Names of the Mother Epilogue: The Mysteries of Enlightenment
- or, Dr. Freud's Gothic Novel Appendix A: Inner and Outer Spaces: The Alien Trilogy Appendix B: Gothic Families Appendix C: The Female Plot of Gothic Fiction Notes Bibliography Index
by "Nielsen BookData"