ENG 11 - Gothic: Database Articles

Many of the vampire romances that have become so popular in the 21st century - especially the ones aimed at a young adult readership, present us with old-school gentleman-vampires who are sensitive and offer the security and stability of old-fashioned gentlemen that some readers many now crave. Such a yearning has to do with the contradictory and conflicted relationship that many women have to feminism and femininity and a perceived conflict between feeling protected one one hand, and being self-determining, on the other.

TOWARD A HISTORY OF GOTHIC AND MODERNISM: DARK MODERNITY FROM BRAM STOKER TO SAMUEL BECKETT
John Paul Riquelme

The Gothic tales of Radcliffe and Lewis concentrate upon the struggle between heroine and villain over property. The most obvious form of property in this plot is that of real estate and capital, as in "The Mysteries of Udolpho" but property in the Gothic can take other forms - including that of the female body.

The horrors that supposedly haunted Hawthorne— the dark episodes in American history and the terrors of the American wilderness—would become the stuff of Hawthorne’s fiction, and the two would become inseparable. And these motifs or concerns would pervade Gothic criticism of Hawthorne into the twenty-first century.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's fantastical writings highlights a previously unrecognized “Gothic mode” that compels us to reinterpret much of his literary corpus. Tracing the archetypal figure of the ghost in “A Short Trip Home,” “The Ice Palace,” “One Trip Abroad,” “Thank You for the Light,” and This Side of Paradise reconfigures our understanding of the unusual presence of supernatural figures in his work, his relationship with Jazz Age social politics, and his engagement with Gothic literary history. Fitzgerald's latent Gothicism not only throws new light on his forgotten short stories and most acclaimed novels but also positions him as a central figure in the emerging discourse of Gothic modernism

King’s fictional art consists of generic hybrids. In combining elements of the
Gothic tale with other genres - such as realism, literary naturalism, myths, fairy
tales, romanticism, and other elements of the fantastic - King enriches his fiction
at the same time as he challenges the traditional limits associated with these
genres. As I see it, the Gothic provides the background; myths and fairy tales make good stories; and literary naturalism lends the world-view implicit in King’s fictional universe. This essay is designed to discuss Gothic genre traits in Stephen King’s fiction.

In the twenty-first century, the Gothic has experienced a cultural resurgence in literature, film, and television for young adult audiences. Young adult readers, poised between childhood and adulthood, have proven especially receptive to the Gothic’s themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality. As part of the Gothic’s incorporation into a broad range of texts for young people, the school story—a conventionally realist genre—
has begun to include supernatural gothic characters including vampires, witches,
angels, and zombies, and has once again become a popular genre for young readers.

The article presents a profile of the author Neil Gaiman. It discusses his prolific and varied output, which includes novels such as "Anansi Boys," children's books such as "Coraline," and comic books which star a character based on the legendary Sandman and the Greek deity Morpheus. Gaiman's gothic literary aesthetic and popularity amongst the Goth subculture are also discussed.