The Gothic and Death

257 Pages·2017·17.138 MB·English

by  Carol Margaret Davison

The Gothic and death
The INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC Series
The Series’ Board of General Editors
Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Steven Bruhm, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne, Australia
Jerrold Hogle, University of Arizona, USA (Chair)
Avril Horner, Kingston University, UK
William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK
The Editorial Advisory Board
Glennis Byron, University of Stirling, Scotland
Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada
David Punter, University of Bristol, England
Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan, Wales
Anne Williams, University of Georgia, USA
Previously published
Monstrous media/spectral subjects: imaging gothic from the nineteenth
century to the present Edited by Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner
Globalgothic Edited by Glennis Byron
EcoGothic Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes
The Gothic and death
Edited by Carol Margaret Davison
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2017
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,
copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of
both author and publisher.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 1 7849 9269 9 hardback
First published 2017
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for
any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset in Arno Pro by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Contents
List of figures page viii
List of contributors ix
Series editor’s preface xiv
Acknowledgements xvi
Introduction – the corpse in the closet: the Gothic, death,
and modernity 1
Carol Margaret Davison
Part I: Gothic graveyards and afterlives
1 Past, present, and future in the Gothic graveyard 21
Serena Trowbridge
2 ‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’: Charles Bonnet
and William Blake’s illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave
(1808) 34
Sibylle Erle
3 Entranced by death: Horace Smith’s Mesmerism 48
Bruce Wyse
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vi Contents
Part II: Gothic revolutions and undead histories
4 ‘This dreadful machine’: the spectacle of death and the
aesthetics of crowd control 63
Emma Galbally and Conrad Brunström
5 Undying histories: Washington Irving’s Gothic afterlives 76
Yael Maurer
6 Deadly interrogations: cycles of death and transcendence in
Byron’s Gothic 88
Adam White
Part III: Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations
7 The annihilation of self and species: the ecoGothic
sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne 103
Jennifer Schell
8 Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction 116
John Cameron Hartley
9 Dead again: zombies and the spectre of cultural decline 130
Matthew Pangborn
Part IV: Global Gothic dead
10 A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’ 145
Christina Petraglia
11 Through the opaque veil: the Gothic and death in Russian
realism 157
Katherine Bowers
12 Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir 174
Vijay Mishra
Part V: Twenty-first-century Gothic and death
13 Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for
young people 191
Michelle J. Smith
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Contents vii
14 Modernity’s fatal addictions: technological necromancy and
E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire 204
Carol Margaret Davison
15 ‘I’m not in that thing you know . . . I’m remote. I’m in the
cloud’: networked spectrality in Charlie Brooker’s
‘Be Right Back’ 218
Neal Kirk
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List of figures
2.1 Th e Death of the Good Old Man. Collection of Robert N.
Essick. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive. Used
with permission. page 40
2.2 D eath of the Strong Wicked Man. Collection of Robert N.
Essick. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive. Used
with permission. 42
2.3 C hrist Descending into the Grave. Collection of Robert N.
Essick. Copyright © 2015 William Blake Archive. Used
with permission. 44
12.1 M ahal (The Mansion), Kamal Amrohi (1949) – The
uncanny resemblance of past life. 182
12.2 Madhumati, Bimal Roy (1958) – Entry into the mansion. 183
12.3 M adhumati, Bimal Roy (1958) – ‘These are my own
brush strokes’. 184
12.4 M adhumati, Bimal Roy (1958) – The double and colonial
architecture. 185
List of contributors
List of contributors
Katherine Bowers is Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the
University of British Columbia. She is working on a monograph on
the influence of eighteenth-century Western Gothic fiction on Russian
realism. In 2015 her co-edited volume Russian Writers and the Fin
de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism appeared; the collection’s chapters
focus on why nineteenth-century Russian literature tends towards the
gloomy. Her work has appeared in American, British, and Russian
publications.
Conrad Brunström is Lecturer in English at National University of
Ireland, Maynooth. He has published two monographs on William
Cowper (2004) and Thomas Sheridan (2011) as well as essays on
Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, Charles Churchill, and a variety of
other eighteenth-century authors and topics including religious poetry,
oratory, nationalism, and queer studies.
Carol Margaret Davison is Professor and Head of the Department of
English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing at the University
of Windsor. Her published books include History of the Gothic: Gothic
Literature 1764–1824 (2009) and Anti-Semitism and British Gothic
Literature (2004). She has published on a wide variety of Gothic-related
authors and topics, and has just completed a co-edited collection of
critical essays devoted to the Scottish Gothic for Edinburgh University
Press with Dr Monica Germanà. She is currently at work on a casebook
of criticism of the British Gothic, 1764–1824.