Gothic Research
Original contributions by scholars of the gothic, postgraduate students and Special Collections curators, written to complement the 2018 Baillieu Library exhibition.
-
Shakespeare and the Gothic
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is widely regarded as the first gothic novel in English. Curiously, as Anne Williams and Christy Desmet have observed, the origins of gothic literature roughly coincided with the elevation of Shakespeare to the status of Britain’s national poet in the late eighteenth century, such that ‘Shakespeare’ and the gothic were ‘born together’.
-
Manuscript Ghosts: Reader and Writer in Romantic Gothic Fiction
In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s affectionate parody of late 18th-century gothic novels, the unlikely heroine, Catherine, discovers what she believes is a manuscript in an ‘old-fashioned black cabinet.’ 1) After struggling with the locks and searching through a series of empty drawers, the reader’s suspense and Catherine’s curiosity are rewarded by ‘a roll of paper…[on which] half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters.’2)
-
Graveyard Poetry
Graveyard poetry is, first and foremost, a devotional mode of poetry. Popular in the early to mid-eighteenth century—that is, in the decades immediately preceding Horace Walpole’s seminal Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764)—it is a mournful brand of poetics designed to facilitate Christian meditation on dying, death and the afterlife by way of the affective imagination.
-
Ghosts of the Past: Contemporary Australian Gothic Theatre
The sublime horrors and lethal dangers of the Australian landscape are the subject of both true story and myth and were circulated by the first waves of white European settlers who arrived from the late eighteenth century onwards.
-
Mezzotints and their Dark Affair with Science and Literature
Mezzotint might just be the perfect medium for gothic imagery as the artist begins with a completely dark, almost terrifying, surface and gives their image life by drawing with light. Renowned English examples of this luminous art form hang in the exhibition Dark imaginings.
-
Dark botanics: gothic forms in Thornton's Temple of flora
The dark tendrils of the gothic permeated the eighteenth-century domain, unveiling its nightmarish preoccupations in disparate ways. In the worlds of science and nature, a gothic impulse infected the upper-class taste for plant exotica, and disquieted a public who were introduced to strange foreign species via the printed page.
-
My Twenty-One Best Gothic Novels: A Book Collectors perspective
This is a list of my twenty-one most desirable examples of Gothic Literature from a book collector's perspective. In this article, I will briefly discuss elements of the publication history of the first six of the twenty-one works that I have chosen.
-
Bram Stoker's Dracula, the King Vampire
There are few names from literature and popular culture that are as well known as that of Dracula. Dracula stars in more than two hundred films, appears in numerous television shows, has taken to the stage not only in drama but also musicals, ballet, and opera, features in video games and comics, and, of course, appears in many vampire fictions in addition to the original novel that bears his name.
-
Gothic Veils: A Critique of the Sentimental Feminine Ideal in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
Gothic novels descended from the sentimental tradition. In fact, female Gothic fiction could be described as a sentimental novel with a twist, the twist of course being intimations of the supernatural. The Gothic is often studied through an interpretation of its motifs. One of the most prominent motifs, the image of the veil, was made popular by Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and has its roots in the sentimental tradition.
-
Feminism and the Gothic: A Brief History
One of the most interesting things about the rise of gothic fiction in the late eighteenth century is that it coincided with the emergence of what we now recognise as modern-day feminism. Although Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) The Castle of Otranto (1764) is widely considered to have been the first gothic novel, it was a female author, Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) who popularised the form in the final decades of the eighteenth century.
-
Gothic Ghosts: Representation of Feminine Passion in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe employs spectres to explore the difficulties inherent to the representation of feminine passion and identity in a male dominated culture. This is particularly true of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) which has a plot that revolves around understanding the disjointed stories of two primary ghosts: Signora Laurentini, and the Marchioness de Villeroi.
-
Gothic Realities: Tabloid Coverage of the Macabre in the Nineteenth Century
There is a common misconception that the nineteenth century ushered in a time of restraint and manners, when polite society shuddered at the thought of unbridled passions and moral decline. But the reality was that popular interest in sensationalist stories of violent crimes, dramatic natural disasters, and bloody accidents reached an all-time high in the Victorian era.
-
Galvanising George Foster, 1803
Until 1832 the corpses of every person hanged for murder in London were carted to the College of Surgeons to be dissected. These were the only bodies legally available to medical men, under An Act for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder (1752), which made dissecting or gibbeting the corpse a secondary punishment for this crime alone. The dissections carried out at the College were public events, theatrically performed. Then the bodies were experimented upon, or turned into gifts for well-connected surgeons elsewhere.
-
The Satanic Alps
During the Romantic period in the early nineteenth century, Switzerland and its Alps were most often portrayed as a kind of utopian alpine idyll, stocked with idealised democratic peasant republicans in harmony with nature. This was thanks firstly to the Swiss Confederation’s long history of independent republicanism and direct democracy, which appealed to both radical and conservative writers alike.
-
The Vampire in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy
In the quote below, Bella Swan, heroine of Stephenie Meyer's controversial vampire romance, the Twilight Saga, seems to summarise the basic premise of the paranormal romance genre. The story has practically become cliché: girl meets boy, boy and girl fall in love, but boy sort of wants to eat girl, yada yada yada …. And, of course, there's sometimes a werewolf in there - or a wereleopard, or a fairy lord, or a demon, or a zombie, or all of the above. It's important to keep things interesting, after all.
-
Gothic bluebooks: The popular thirst for fear and dread
Visitors to the Dark Imaginings exhibition may find themselves drawn to two hand-sized books, immediately distinguishable by their melodramatic titles, and exaggerated illustrations in splashes of bright colour.
-
Gothic Doubles: Feminine Identity Formation in Mrs. Isaac's Ariel, or The Invisible Monitor (1801)
Ann Radcliffe popularized the technique of exploring the heroine's internal, psychological states of mind through the creation of an external double. She did this through the missing mother in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Italian (1797), and the mysterious spectres that haunt the text in A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).