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This article examines the penny blood The String of Pearls in terms of its treatmentof human remains as the equivalent of human excrement. In the mid-nineteenth century,London underwent a transformation in terms of its waste and sanitation management,involving changes which were often controversial and generated considerable debate anddiscussion in all areas of society. Many of these changes had a disproportionate affect onthe urban poor who were also the main readers of the penny bloods and dreadfuls, so it isno surprise to find that sanitation is a major topic in these fictions. The article argues thatthe Sweeney Todd serial acts as an intervention into these discussions.
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The paper proposes to read the dialogue of two generic traditions: the novelof manners and gothic fiction in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The genericdialogue in Northanger Abbey constitutes a particularly interesting case, asit appears at the very inception of the manorial tradition in fiction and thusbears a strong modelling function. The paper argues that Northanger Abbeyrepresents a subversive version of the novel of manners, which contextualizesand substantiates the transgressive character of the gothic.
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The paper discusses spatial modelling in Ellis James Davis’s Victorian utopia, Pyrna:A Commune; or, Under The Ice (1875) regarding its appropriation of the Gothic modeinto the utopian convention. By examining selected aspects of the novella’s world, thisarticle argues that the Gothic tropes of numinosity and sublime constitute significantelements as major defamiliarizing components of the semiotically monolithic utopianspatial model.
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The text of Thoth. A Romance, a late nineteenth-century dystopia by Joseph Shield Nicholson, is here analysed as a generic amalgam characterised by conspicuous repetitiousness and the motif of multiplication of a circular pattern on the levels of plot, setting, imagery and characterisation. A meeting of the Gothic and the dystopian in the text results in an expansion of the former convention, politicisation of the Gothic and blending of the psychoanalytic with the dystopian.
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The article proposes a cognitive-poetic reading of Susan Heyboer O’Keefe’s novel Frankenstein’s Monster (2010) – a modern rendition of the myth of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature – with regard to the theory of conceptual integration proposed by G. Fauconnier and M. Turner (2002). It is argued that the reader’s conceptualization of the eponymous Monster emerges in the process of conceptual blending, where several input mental spaces, constructed around elements of the philosophical concept of the Great Chain of Being, are merged to produce a novel entity. Thus, the reader’s active participation in meaning construction allows her/him to redefine her/his perception of monstrosity.
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The gothic imagination often expresses a sense of the instability and/or vulnerabilityof human identity, bearing either on specific individuals or on the species as a whole.The present article examines the 2017 film Get Out, written and directed by JordanPeele, in order to highlight the ways in which its exploration of the abovementionedtopic relates to the tradition of the gothic as it is recognisable in literary texts dating fromas far back as the eighteenth century. Relevant titles include Walter Scott’s Count Robertof Paris and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as well asexamples from film. The argument of the article therefore focuses on a gamut of thematicconcerns that link different works across different ages and media.
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The Creature of Frankenstein never managed to fulfil his desire of finding a loving partnerin Mary Shelley’s novel, but his symbolic progeny continues to haunt modern popularculture. The article discusses the case of “family resemblance” between Frankenstein’sCreature and the title antihero of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. In theirrespective literary sources, they share an inborn deformity, an appreciation for music,a romantic yearning for love and acceptance matched with sociopathic violence. Recently,the TV series Penny Dreadful elaborates on these allusions, conflating the narratives byShelley and Leroux, as well as their later adaptations.
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The article discusses the journey of the gothic novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg (1770-1835) from the repertoire of Scottish Romanticism to the neobaroque film adaptation Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany (1985) by the Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000). The film demonstrates Has’s anamorphic position and emphasizes the crucial role of the gothic text’s neobaroque aesthetics in illuminating Polish cultural and political conflicts in 1986 when the film was released. Has rearticulates contradictions structuring the puritan-provincial mind depicted by Hogg and launches a critique of factional fanaticism.
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This article analyses Gothic tropes in the science fiction film Pandorum (2009, dir.Christian Alvart), through the lens of such concepts as evolution and science, which arepresented in the film as inherently monstrous. Key to the analysis is the notion of thereturn of the repressed (or abjected) past which invades the future, disrupting biological,social, and moral borders of the human. This Gothic return, facilitated by advancedscience and technology, turns the future into a site of humanity’s confrontation with theiranimal instincts, highlighting the fragility of our civilisation and proving our subjectionto evolutionary processes.
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This article explores the political implications, both at the time and for present-dayreaders, of the way La Princesse de Clèves calls into question gender norms/roles.Analyzing plots and characters in Lafayette’s text and readers/critics’ reactions in variouscontexts, it foregrounds the unsettling potential of a text that paradoxically moved fromthe position of hapax-cum- media-sensation to that of a paradigm of the early-modernnovel. By focusing on its continued efficacy in disturbing heteronormative stereotypes,itsheds light on the way literature from before the modern era can contribute to identifyingand analyzing queerness and gender dissidence in past historical contexts.
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The article proposes a reflection concerning the connections between the voicerepresentations or vocal practices, worked out towards the end of the Enlightenmentperiod and in the first decades of the 19th century in the French cultural area, and thebirth of the socio-economic system characteristic of the bourgeois society. The paperfocuses, in particular, on political presuppositions – in the Aristotelian sense of the word« political » – on which all the uses of voice, both spoken and sung, are based. Theobjective of the study is to understand the status of voice and singing in the process ofcreation of a modern anthropology.
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In André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs, counterfeit money and characters flow in a plotbased on a circulatory system in which they seem to be interchangeable. Ideas flow as wellin the novel, creating a polyphonic intertextuality. Gide plays with his preferred authors,such as Nietzsche, whose claims are looked into in order to create a distance and questionthem. Such premises are held by cynical characters as well as the protagonist Bertrand,a positive nietzscheanist icon in his will to affirm himself and radically question upperclass and religious values. The money counterfeit takes its roots in the collapse of thegold standard in 1914’s France. Gide depicts a world in which all values’ authenticity areshaken, the counterfeit money serving as a metonymy to question Nietzsche’s arguments,often in an ironical way. Nietzsche’s ideas flow from a character to the next and seem tobe put to the test.
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The study explores how Romain Gary reviews and rejects various moral attitudes in hisnovel The Roots of Heaven. His later novel The Kites sheds a new light at this novel from1956. A cross reading of both novels allows to show why, according to Gary, ideologiesare degenerating and what values remain unchanged.
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A dream, that of freedom, inspires Ati, the central character of 2084. The End of theWorld, a novel published in 2015, in France, by Boualem Sansal, an Algerian author.In this work, ‘the end of the world’ has taken place. The powers of the North havebeen wiped out. Only one country survives, the ‘Abistan’, a theocratic empire basedon ‘Acceptance’, the religion of this entity. No deviance is tolerated. The title refersto George Orwell’s novel, 1984, published in 1949, in England. The subtitle suggeststhat all freedom has disappeared. One individual, however, Ati, began to glimpse the‘mystery of freedom’. This dream lives in him now. How is it translated into this story byan irrepressible aspiration, by a feverish quest and a vain research?
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The aim of this paper is to present the interrelationship between politics and therepresentation of the patient’s body (pathography) in the novel of the Algeriancontemporary activist and writer Boualem Sansal. In his novel, 2084. La fin du monde,whose title refers directly to Orwell’s work, Sansal creates a vision of a world dominatedby religious totalitarianism. The purpose of this paper is to show how the affected bodyof the main character (and its recovery) becomes both a metaphor of opposition to thetotalitarian system and a central structural, semantic and rhythmic figure of the text.
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As George Orwell did with 1984, Thomas Gunzig gives us in his misleading novela dystopian vision of the world, a distorted reflection of our everyday life, an acidpamphlet of an ultra-materialistic society. The Belgian writer fits his novel in that ofGeorge Orwell according to his own referents. The purpose of this paper is therefore toidentify links of filiation, structural and thematic analogies with the Orwelian text whilerevealing the specificity of the Belgian novel.
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Considered to be one of the founders of Quebec theater, Marcel Dubé began to make hismark on Quebec’s literary scene in the 1950s. In his works, he focused on the underprivilegedparts of society to expose a variety of injustices, then attacked the bourgeois in order tocharge them with their responsibility for the fate of the Quebec people. After revisiting thehistorical context that determined the political situation at the dawn of the Quiet Revolution,this article aims to show the playwright’s involvement in the Quebec liberation movement.
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Satire is a literary genre with esthetic value determined by laughter. Every kind of laughteris specific for different periods of economic and social development. The forms of materialproduction underlie the perception of the comic. Satirical traditions are intrinsic to nationalideological systems. Satire commits seditious attacks against social ideologies. It influencesthe politics and the politics influences the satire which is only possible with a certain levelof sociopolitical development of a society. Satirical tradition can be formed and establishedonly at conditions of democratic political tradition, otherwise it takes perverted shapes.
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