Gothic Critics

Gothic Critics

John McCrae
1. "The villain of the piece has to be fairly upper class"
2. The Gothic was "appealing to everyone who enjoyed a vicarious thrill" not just to women
3. "Ambiguities of reality are everywhere"
4. Dracula is "almost automatically cinematic"
5. "Wolves are deep in the psychology of Europe"
6. Gothic texts are "written by outsiders"
7. Dracula is the "personification of the undead"
Nick Groom
1. "The Gothic blurs the boundaries of the victim and perpetrator"
2. "Art is a way to keep the dead among us"
3. "Dorian becomes a vampire himself, feeding on sin"
4. The central question within the Gothic is "who, or what, am I?"
5. "There is a blurring between one's self and the other"
6. "The past is inescapable, and indissolubly linked to the present"
7. Dracula is "a novel that questions what it is to be human"
8. Female vampire "embodies a fear of non-heterosexual reproduction and the rejection of men"
9. The vampire "combines fears and fantasies of consumption"
10. Stoker "inverts the Eucharist"
Fred Botting
1. Gothic novels "adopt a cautionary stategy, warning of dangers of social and moral transgression in their darkest and most threatening form"
2. "Gothic signifies a writing of excess"
3. "Gothic landscapes are desolate, alienating and full of menace"
4. "The Castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both building and family line, it became the site where fear and anxieties returned in the present"
5. "In Gothic productions imagination and emotional effects exceed reason"
6. "Passion, excitement and sensation transgress social proprieties and moral laws"
7. "Exciting rather than informing, it chilled their blood, delighted their superstitious fancies"
8. "Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires"
Clive Bloom
1. 'The Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction'
Robert Kidd
David Rogers
1. "Narratives constructed upon a clash between polar forces such as those of Good and Evil are as old as narrative itself"
2. Stoker is "pitting Dracula against a group of un-ambiguously 'manly' men whose qualities, actions and outlook seem to contrast him in virtually every way"
3. The men "in being accepted for what they are not, they become ironically aligned with their enemy"
Elaine Showalter
1. Fin de Siecle: "all the laws that governed sexual identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking down"
Gail Cunningham
1. The New Woman as: "a nervous type, often anorexic, a neurasthenic woman, prone to hysteria"
2. The New Woman as: "a highly sexual creature, whose permissiveness undermined social stability"
John Bowen
1. "The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and perverse family of texts"
2. The strange place a protagonist finds themselves: "It is often threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a prison"
3. "everything that characters and readers think that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance"
4. "Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past, what is ancient and what is modern"

Next up

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by Katie Newton about 7 years ago