Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0130
J. D’Arcy
This article focuses on a 1980s theatrical adaptation of a 1980s novel from the vantage point of the twenty-first century; the production experienced by the author was a live performance in its twenty-fifth anniversary year. The Woman in Black, adapted from Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, has run virtually unchanged since its transfer to the West End in the late 1980s. While the Woman has been read as a feminist depiction of a female ghost who defies patriarchal control, this article argues that such readings are mitigated by the material performance and marketing strategies necessary for the creation of a commercially successful Gothic horror production. While the play mirrors the novel’s depictions of 1980s cultural horrors, its apparent depiction of a powerful female ghost elides the various strategies which contain and limit that power, and work to erase the actor. The production’s unusually long run serves to emphasise these Gothic erasures, elisions, and sleights of hand.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0134
S. N. Fhlainn
The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) is one of a host of recent 1980s-set texts that returns to the decade through the lens of cultural nostalgia. Recalling and resituating its viewers in the Reagan era, the series presents a contemporary Gothic narrative by returning to the 1980s as a period of profound cultural importance, setting its secondary Gothic space, The Upside Down, as a Gothic neoliberal shadow world that conveys profound implications for a terrifying future. Examining the 1980s as a nexus point for socio-political anxieties and nostalgic recall, which has dominated the economic landscape and many Hollywood films and shows in the twenty-first century, this article argues that Stranger Things situates its characters at the precipice of a wrong turn in history, a period in which its youthful band of heroes, like their 1980s counterparts in its science fiction and fantasy cinema before them, must chase down their own futures to prevent a terrible fate. Through ‘reflective nostalgia’, this rift between the 1980s onscreen and the shadow future of the Upside Down is presented as a diachronic narrative, a return to the past to identify and critique the 1980s as a point of origin for numerous socio-economic anxieties and ills in our contemporary neoliberal Gothic world. Stranger Things, alongside other 1980s retro-texts, articulates our own Gothic terrors in the contemporary moment. Moreover, this article argues how and why the Gothic 1980s is a revisited site of return from which we need to learn, particularly following the post-2008 financial crisis, to overcome the necro-economic consequences of the ‘Upside Down’ neoliberal wasteland of the twenty-first century.
{"title":"A Rift between Worlds: The Retro-1980s and the Neoliberal Upside Down in Stranger Things","authors":"S. N. Fhlainn","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0134","url":null,"abstract":"The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) is one of a host of recent 1980s-set texts that returns to the decade through the lens of cultural nostalgia. Recalling and resituating its viewers in the Reagan era, the series presents a contemporary Gothic narrative by returning to the 1980s as a period of profound cultural importance, setting its secondary Gothic space, The Upside Down, as a Gothic neoliberal shadow world that conveys profound implications for a terrifying future. Examining the 1980s as a nexus point for socio-political anxieties and nostalgic recall, which has dominated the economic landscape and many Hollywood films and shows in the twenty-first century, this article argues that Stranger Things situates its characters at the precipice of a wrong turn in history, a period in which its youthful band of heroes, like their 1980s counterparts in its science fiction and fantasy cinema before them, must chase down their own futures to prevent a terrible fate. Through ‘reflective nostalgia’, this rift between the 1980s onscreen and the shadow future of the Upside Down is presented as a diachronic narrative, a return to the past to identify and critique the 1980s as a point of origin for numerous socio-economic anxieties and ills in our contemporary neoliberal Gothic world. Stranger Things, alongside other 1980s retro-texts, articulates our own Gothic terrors in the contemporary moment. Moreover, this article argues how and why the Gothic 1980s is a revisited site of return from which we need to learn, particularly following the post-2008 financial crisis, to overcome the necro-economic consequences of the ‘Upside Down’ neoliberal wasteland of the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44376703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0133
James R. Morgart
This article argues that filmmaker Stuart Gordon uses the Gothic to critique neoliberal desires that proliferated during the 1980s and continue to exist today. Gothic tropes, particularly monstrosity, coincide with the political in a number of Gothic works by filmmakers such as Tobe Hooper, Larry Cohen, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. Examining a number of these works reveals that monstrosity is designated to characters who privilege individual desires over the community; however, by closely reading Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986) alongside these films, I argue that Gordon’s films offer the more chilling recognition for audiences that neoliberalism’s real power is in its ability to adapt itself to appeal to and ultimately exploit our desires no matter how benevolent we believe them to be.
{"title":"‘Everyone Has Monsters Within’: Neoliberal Release of Monstrous Desire in Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986)","authors":"James R. Morgart","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0133","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that filmmaker Stuart Gordon uses the Gothic to critique neoliberal desires that proliferated during the 1980s and continue to exist today. Gothic tropes, particularly monstrosity, coincide with the political in a number of Gothic works by filmmakers such as Tobe Hooper, Larry Cohen, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. Examining a number of these works reveals that monstrosity is designated to characters who privilege individual desires over the community; however, by closely reading Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986) alongside these films, I argue that Gordon’s films offer the more chilling recognition for audiences that neoliberalism’s real power is in its ability to adapt itself to appeal to and ultimately exploit our desires no matter how benevolent we believe them to be.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48802535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0120
I. Duncan
Episodes of ghost-seeing radicalize a key device of Walter Scott’s historical novels, in which cultural difference submits to a developmental logic of historical difference. The spectral apparition signals not only the ghost-seer’s imminent death but also a historical extinction, that of the life-world in which supernatural phenomena count as real. This essay considers the complication of this historicist logic in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and The Monastery (1820). In the former, ghostliness is endemic to a time of pure liminality, unmoored from historical purpose: the suspension of the present between a past that fails to pass and a future that fails to arrive empties it of ontological substance. In The Monastery, the ghost rudely resists exorcism by rational explanation. Scott’s White Lady indexes the severity of the historical breach inflicted by the Protestant Reformation: a discontinuity more violent, in its impact upon knowledge, belief and the imagination, than revolutions of dynasties or political systems.
{"title":"Scott's Ghost-Seeing","authors":"I. Duncan","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0120","url":null,"abstract":"Episodes of ghost-seeing radicalize a key device of Walter Scott’s historical novels, in which cultural difference submits to a developmental logic of historical difference. The spectral apparition signals not only the ghost-seer’s imminent death but also a historical extinction, that of the life-world in which supernatural phenomena count as real. This essay considers the complication of this historicist logic in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and The Monastery (1820). In the former, ghostliness is endemic to a time of pure liminality, unmoored from historical purpose: the suspension of the present between a past that fails to pass and a future that fails to arrive empties it of ontological substance. In The Monastery, the ghost rudely resists exorcism by rational explanation. Scott’s White Lady indexes the severity of the historical breach inflicted by the Protestant Reformation: a discontinuity more violent, in its impact upon knowledge, belief and the imagination, than revolutions of dynasties or political systems.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41416226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0123
D. Punter
It has become something of a cliché to speak of ‘Scottish Gothic’ as though there were one country which could house a certain set of hauntings. But Scotland is, of course, a diverse country, as we have seen over many centuries in its political and religious dealings. In particular, we need to speak together of the industrial – or post-industrial – ‘heartland’ (whatever that contested term might mean) and of the hauntings that might specifically afflict those lands excluded from ‘development’ in any obvious social sense. No nation (especially a ‘stateless nation’) is unified; but in this paper I want to return to Graeme Macrae Burnet's remarkable Highlands-centred novel His Bloody Project, and place alongside it some of the prolific work of the more urban Barry Graham, who has been hailed as the successor to Stephen King. Might there be evidence here of some kinds of mutual haunting?
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Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0121
S. Brewster
The intense, uncanny relationship between intimacy and exclusion, homeliness and strangeness finds evocative expression in the Gothic tales and ghost stories of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant. Their narratives resist and open themselves to haunting, with the supernatural alterity they encounter proving oddly familiar and posing fundamental questions about knowledge and subjectivity. In these moments, distinctions between inside and outside in psychic, social and environmental terms are radically unsettled. Using Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘extimacy,’ an ‘intimate exteriority’ that constitutes an estranged attachment to the stranger within, this article examines the unresolved struggle in Hogg and Stevenson with this intimate yet agitating sense of otherness that disrupts the assertion of identity. Contrastingly, Oliphant attempts to accommodate the extimate, and embraces her obligations to that which haunts.
{"title":"Extimacies: Strange Attachments in James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant","authors":"S. Brewster","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0121","url":null,"abstract":"The intense, uncanny relationship between intimacy and exclusion, homeliness and strangeness finds evocative expression in the Gothic tales and ghost stories of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant. Their narratives resist and open themselves to haunting, with the supernatural alterity they encounter proving oddly familiar and posing fundamental questions about knowledge and subjectivity. In these moments, distinctions between inside and outside in psychic, social and environmental terms are radically unsettled. Using Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘extimacy,’ an ‘intimate exteriority’ that constitutes an estranged attachment to the stranger within, this article examines the unresolved struggle in Hogg and Stevenson with this intimate yet agitating sense of otherness that disrupts the assertion of identity. Contrastingly, Oliphant attempts to accommodate the extimate, and embraces her obligations to that which haunts.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69552850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0117
Monica Germanà
{"title":"Ghost-Tours, Body Snatchers, and Optical Illusions: An Introduction to Haunted Scotlands","authors":"Monica Germanà","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0117","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49108997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0124
Monica Germanà
Focussing on the spatial dimension of historical haunting, this article analyses the depiction of northern scenery in contemporary Scottish cinema, to highlight a shift from the romanticised landscape of historical figurations of Scottish identity to a territory haunted both by the nation’s past traumas and its dark secrets. I examine Scott Graham’s film Shell (2012) and Gordon Napier’s 1745: An Untold Story of Slavery (2017) to demonstrate how, while they reference the sublime aesthetics and identity politics conventionally attached to the representation of the north and the cultural construction of the Scottish Highlands, these films also interrogate the relationship between history and landscape. Shell and 1745 consequently point to an ambivalent definition of belonging, made more complicated by the specific historical and political references rooted in the landscape. The Scottish north is unveiled as an uncanny territory, where a sense of belonging based on established national history narratives is replaced by the subversive (re)possession of the landscape by the less visible stories that continue to haunt it: the contemporary legacy of Highland Clearances in Shell and Scotland’s involvement in Empire and slavery in 1745.
{"title":"The Haunted Landscape of the Uncanny North: Scott Graham’s Shell (2012) and Gordon Napier’s 1745 (2017)","authors":"Monica Germanà","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0124","url":null,"abstract":"Focussing on the spatial dimension of historical haunting, this article analyses the depiction of northern scenery in contemporary Scottish cinema, to highlight a shift from the romanticised landscape of historical figurations of Scottish identity to a territory haunted both by the nation’s past traumas and its dark secrets. I examine Scott Graham’s film Shell (2012) and Gordon Napier’s 1745: An Untold Story of Slavery (2017) to demonstrate how, while they reference the sublime aesthetics and identity politics conventionally attached to the representation of the north and the cultural construction of the Scottish Highlands, these films also interrogate the relationship between history and landscape. Shell and 1745 consequently point to an ambivalent definition of belonging, made more complicated by the specific historical and political references rooted in the landscape. The Scottish north is unveiled as an uncanny territory, where a sense of belonging based on established national history narratives is replaced by the subversive (re)possession of the landscape by the less visible stories that continue to haunt it: the contemporary legacy of Highland Clearances in Shell and Scotland’s involvement in Empire and slavery in 1745.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43392074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0118
Martha McGill
This article explores the popularisation of the concept of haunted space in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. While earlier ghost stories were usually about the haunting of people, the rise of Gothic and Romantic literary aesthetics fuelled a new interest in both the Scottish landscape, and the dramatic potential of lurking spectres. Amid the upheaval of industrialisation and the Highland Clearances, and in a period when Scots were still wrestling with the implications of the 1707 Union, authors recorded stories of wandering ghosts as part of a broader movement to fashion a distinctive identity rooted in a specific cultural context. Against the frequently broad scope of academic literature on spectrality, this article draws attention to the crucial significance of contextual nuances and specific historical and social circumstances. In particular, it points to the fraught politics of loss and repossession in relation to the Highlands’ history of depopulation and modernisation, casting a fresh light on the historical events that have given shape to Scottish haunted space.
{"title":"The Evolution of Haunted Space in Scotland","authors":"Martha McGill","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0118","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the popularisation of the concept of haunted space in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. While earlier ghost stories were usually about the haunting of people, the rise of Gothic and Romantic literary aesthetics fuelled a new interest in both the Scottish landscape, and the dramatic potential of lurking spectres. Amid the upheaval of industrialisation and the Highland Clearances, and in a period when Scots were still wrestling with the implications of the 1707 Union, authors recorded stories of wandering ghosts as part of a broader movement to fashion a distinctive identity rooted in a specific cultural context. Against the frequently broad scope of academic literature on spectrality, this article draws attention to the crucial significance of contextual nuances and specific historical and social circumstances. In particular, it points to the fraught politics of loss and repossession in relation to the Highlands’ history of depopulation and modernisation, casting a fresh light on the historical events that have given shape to Scottish haunted space.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46748509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0119
A. Wright
Forgotten, concealed histories can return with a vengeance to haunt the imagination of a nation. This article explores the seldom-discussed history of the abduction, long-term imprisonment and falsified burial of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from Edinburgh by allies of her estranged husband, and then slowly transported to St Kilda where she spent the following nine years. It is a tale upon which James Boswell commented when he toured Scotland with Samuel Johnson, and which, in the wake of Boswell's commentary, entered the Gothic imaginary, first through the romances of Ann Radcliffe. Although marital imprisonment was sadly all too widespread during the eighteenth century, with numerous sources to choose from, the history of Lady Grange, blocked for four decades after her death, returned to haunt the pages of romances and periodical articles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After examining what James Boswell wrote about Lady Grange, the article focuses on two romances of Ann Radcliffe, her 1789 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and her 1790 A Sicilian Romance. The article then looks at William Erskine's 1798 Epistle from Lady Grange and concludes by reflecting upon the unblocking of the story in the nineteenth-century periodical press.
{"title":"The History of the Unfortunate Lady Grange: Gothic Exhumations of a Concealed Scottish Fate","authors":"A. Wright","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0119","url":null,"abstract":"Forgotten, concealed histories can return with a vengeance to haunt the imagination of a nation. This article explores the seldom-discussed history of the abduction, long-term imprisonment and falsified burial of Lady Grange, who was kidnapped from Edinburgh by allies of her estranged husband, and then slowly transported to St Kilda where she spent the following nine years. It is a tale upon which James Boswell commented when he toured Scotland with Samuel Johnson, and which, in the wake of Boswell's commentary, entered the Gothic imaginary, first through the romances of Ann Radcliffe. Although marital imprisonment was sadly all too widespread during the eighteenth century, with numerous sources to choose from, the history of Lady Grange, blocked for four decades after her death, returned to haunt the pages of romances and periodical articles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After examining what James Boswell wrote about Lady Grange, the article focuses on two romances of Ann Radcliffe, her 1789 The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and her 1790 A Sicilian Romance. The article then looks at William Erskine's 1798 Epistle from Lady Grange and concludes by reflecting upon the unblocking of the story in the nineteenth-century periodical press.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41559975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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