Bunnell, Charlene. “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film.” Planks of Reason: Essay on the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984. 79-100.
85 “Perhaps the best illustration of the Gothic’s use of imagery is the description of the protagonist seeing for the first time the physical embodiment of the noctunal world, the ‘haunted’ house or castle. The setting, the mood, the atmosphere, and the hnt of supernatural possibilities all make the journey to and within this world a rather frightening yet vivid experience.”
Modleski, Tania. Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge, 1982.
Excellent book relevant to all aspects of popular culture studies and especially to women's popular culture. Studies of girl tween, teen, chicklit, and others must include this book because of its highly refined and configured critical eye that links popular culture to other studies while also analyzing the critical framework for such studies.
11 Begins by framing the book within the "double critical standard, which
feminists have claimed biases literary studies" and which aggrandizes "certain
classic studies of popular male genres" while the same cannot be said for
women's popular culture. Modleski argues that women's popular culture should be
studied, but not simply through the application of the same criteria used for
men's popular culture (often the same criteria applied to high cultural texts).
The problem of elevating male popular culture while simultaneously dismissing
or diminishing women's popular culture has lessened, but not been negated in recent
years.
12 "At the end of a majority of popular narratives the woman is disfigured, dead, or at the very least, domesticated."
18 cite Joanna Russ and how Russ shows "that men have taken all the active plots" and that women can die for their action.
21 how film noir has been extensively studied, but gaslight films have been largely ignored
27 "avoiding the repetition and 'standardization' characteristic of mass art means that modernism must stress 'innovation and novelty,' must, therefore, capitulate to the 'pressure...to "make it new"' and thus act in accordance 'with the ever swifter historicity of consumer society, with its yearly or quarterly style and fashion changes.'"
36 cites guidelines for Harlequin romance and how they are told "from the heroine's point of view and in the third person."
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
90 "What I mean by Female Gothic is easily defined: the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic. But what I mena - or anyone else means - by 'the Gothic' is not so easily stated except that it has to do with fear. In Gothic writings fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare."
102 "But there is something more to Christina Rossett's goblins that suggests to me a specifically feminine Victorian fantasy: that is, that they fear are brothers. They are not, in so many words, brothers to the sisters Laura and Lizzie in the poem, but a separate breed."
107 "To make my point about the female imagination and its delight in the remembered brutishness of childhood, I have taken the liberty not only of adding italics but of tampering with that quotation. For what Catherine [of Wuthering Heights] cries is not 'I wish I were a child again,' but 'I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free. . . ."
107 "The savagery of girlhood accounts in part for the persistence of teh Gothic mode into our own time; also the self-digust, the self-hatred, and the impetus to self-destruction that have been increasingly prominent themes in the writing of women in the twentieth century. Despair is hardly the exclusive province of any one sex or class in our age, but to give visual form to the fear of self, to hold anxiety up to the Gothic mirror of the imagination, may well be more common in the writings of women than of men. While I cannot prove this statistically, I can offer a reason: that nothing separates female experience from male experience more sharply, and more early in life, than the compulsion to visualize the self."
109-110 "It was Plath herself, with her superb eye for the imagery of self-hatred, who renewed for poets - Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Erica Jong, and [now 110] many others - the grotesque traditions of Female Gothic. Her terror was not the monster, the goblin, or the freak, but the living corpse."
122 "Feminism is one thing, and literary feminism, or what I propose to call heroinism is another."
124 "And where heroinism is concerned, the by-rpoducts of the struggle - changes in literary form and language, in tone, imagery, setting - are often more interesting and more important than the particular heroines it has produced."
126 "[T]he Gothic fantasies of Mrs. Radcliffe are a locus of heroinism which, ever since, women have turned to feminist purposes. Feminism and heroinism can often be seen to touch in women's literature, but they are not the same."
127 "The travel motif in women's literature seems, however, to require separating into its two distant kinds: indoor travel and outdoor travel. Outdoor travel is imaginary planetary travel of the kind familiar to someone like Mrs. Radcliffe from the old romances."
130 "The prohibitions on outdoor female activities must account for the proud place of the tomboy in women's literature. For in every age, whatecer the social rules, there has always been one time of a woman's life, the years before puberty, when walking, running, climbing, battling, and tumbling are as normal female as they are male activities."
Meyers, Helene. Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
xi-xii "Femicidal Fears argues that contemporary female-authored femicidal plots - plots in which women are killed or fear for their lives - constitute possibilities for understanding and intervening in the vexed and sometimes acrimonious feminist debates about victimology, essentialism, [now xii] female agency, and the female body that have proliferated in recent years. As Elaine Showalter notes, feminist critics have spent more time charting female Gothci traditions based on 'narratives of maternity, madeness, or the grotesque' and less on the strand of the of the contemporary female Gothic centered on violent crime in general and murder in particular (139)."
25 "At least in part, sexual politics has been responsible for the devaluation of the Gothic, a genre which has, from its inception, been seen as feminine and female: it privileges emotion and the domestic sphere, and middle-class women have obsessively written and read it."
Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992.
1 "the focus on buried writing, typifies many characteristics themes of Collin's writing.
2 "Feminist critics have read the female Gothic as a narrative about motehrs and daughters, in which a daughter who has lost her mother either discovers that she is not dead or finds mother substitutes in her place."
13 "Although the extent to which the Gothic is subversive has remained controversial, critics have seen the genre as linked to and reflecting the rise of the bourgeoisie and the decline of a feudal aristocracy during the late eighteenth century. The Gothic castle, a site of exoticism and mystery but also of imprsonment and terror, evokes a feudal system that is archaic and outmoded, a symbolism that mirrors the politcial debate about traditiona and change during the French Revolutionary period."
14 "For the feminist critic, however, the subversive nature of the Gothic extends beyond its reflections on the French revolution to its exploration of the troubled politics of domestic ideology. Underscoring the genre's focus on family stories, such feminist critics as Ellen Moers, Margaret Anne Doody, Claire Kahane, and Kate Ellis have shown how Gothics are particularly compelling fictons for the many women who read and write them because of their nightmarish figuration of feminine experience within the home. Moers coined the term 'female Gothic' to describe how a tradition of women writers, beginning with Ann Radcliffe, use the genre's paraphernalia of clausterphobic castles, villainous dominating men, and beleaguered heroines to thematize women's sense of isolation and imprisonment within a domestic ideology fast becoming hegemonic by the end of the eighteenth century."
Long Hoeveler, Diane. "The Female Gothic, Beating Fantasies, and the Civilizing Process." Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity. Eds. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1998. 103-132.
103-4 "The strange stasis - the slow-motion and then sudden flurry, the revolving cycles of inertia and mania - all are characteristic of the long-winded, hysterical prose of the female gothic. But such devices merely encode and proffer the dominant ideology that lies at the heart of the genre, that lies at the heart of the heroines, that [now 104] lies at the heart of women in patriarchal society: the ideology I have come to recognize as 'gothic feminism.'"
104-5 "The gothic has always lured its critics into that quagmire and managed to elude systematic analysis as a result. The challenge in writing about the female gothic, then, lies initially in defining one's terms. And, unfortunately, analysis of the 'gothic' has traditionally been accomplished through what Eugenia DeLamotte has called 'the shopping-list approach.' [...] But during the past three decades literary critics have turned their attention to defining the genre by addressing questions about the 'meaning of the Gothic myth.' The female gothic most recently has been subjected to several useful and provocative interpretations; howver, all of them privilege the notion of the 'female' 'self' in ways that ignore the highly ideological nature of both the gothic 'myth' and their own critical analyses [now on page 105] "
126 "The gothic heroine's goal throughoit most of the text is to ascertain the 'secret' that the patriarchy has managed to keep from her, either through an elaborate system of walls and locked rooms (the prison and the asylum) or thorugh the power of language to dissemble, to reveal and concel at the same time (missing marriage licenses or wills)."
127 "Gothic feminist heroines discover their own bodies and voices only after they redeem tehir mothers, and they speak in a voice that some contemporary feminists have come to recognize as 'victim feminism.'"
qtd. in Wolfreys, Julian. Introduction. The Beetle. By Richard Marsh. New York: 2004.
"'the major organizing figure of the Gothic' which is its 'imputation of anachronism as a source of disorder' (Mighall 1999, 249)."
Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 1996.
11 "The city, a gloomyforest or dark labyrinth itself, became a site of nocturnal corruption and violence, a locus of real horror; teh family became a place rendered threatening and uncanny by the haunting return of past transgressions and attendant guilt on an everyday world shrouded in strangeness."
32 "Shadows, indeed, were among the foremost characteristics of Gothic works. They marked the limits necessary to the constitution of an enlightened world and delineated the limitations of neoclassical perceptions. Darkness, metaphorically, threatened the light of reason with what it did not know."
44-5 "A hybrid form from its inception, the Gothic blend of medieval [45] and historical romance with the novel of life and manners was framed in supernatural, sentimental or sensational terms. The constitency of the genre relied of the settings, devices and events."
Smith, Allan Lloyd. "Postmodernism/Gothicism." Modern Gothic. Eds. Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith. New York: Manchester UP, 1996. 6-19.
6 "Maurice Lévy's attack on incoherence in the use of the word 'Gothic' - which he would prefer to see restricted to a particular period (1764-1824) and to a specific cultural aesthetic, religious, and political background: 'the first Gothic Revival and the culture of Georgian England' - serves as a potent reminder of the pitfalls we find in applying the term too generally. But even Lévy lacks any faith that the suitably chastised critics will return to a pureer use of this determinedly impure and extravagant term."
Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
21 "As soon as science begins to disturb notions of the human, it becomes a site of particular interest to the Gothic writer."
21 "As the nineteenth century progressed, the damaging effects of industrialism became increasingly clear and had much to do with the emergence of a new site of Gothic horror: the city. In Victorian Gothic (q.v.), the castles and abbeys of the eighteenth century give way to labyrinthine streets, sinister [now on page 22] rookeries, opium dens, and the filth and stench of the squalid slums."
26 "Generally speaking, Gothi sensation novels fall into two main categories. Some novelists, often male, work within the female Gothic (q.v.) tradition of the heroine imprisoned within the home or some substitute institution."
27 "Transgression becomes even more central to the second main type of Gothic sensation fiction, where it is associated with the sensational spectacle of the mad or criminal female protagonist. The women tend to assume the roles of both heroine and monster (q.v.), and provoke anxieties about the instability of identity and the breakdown of gender roles."
29 "This focus on the contemporary world does not mean that Gothic relinquishes its interest in the past. At the same time as it is appropriated to represent new social problems, it also offers a space in which the past can persist in modified form."
39 "The Gothic is frequently considered to be a genre that re-emerges with particular force during times of cultural crisis and which serves to negotiate the anxieties of the age by working through them in a displaced form. Such a theory would certainly be supported by the sudden resurgence of Gothic in the late nineteenth century."
50 Gothic Postmodernism
53 in discussing the Gothic and Gothic postmodern texts "The postmodern, one might suggest, is the site of a certain 'haunting', and in this sense can never free itself from the ghosts of the past, even if it takes as its task the constant (and constantly dubious) reconstruction of that past. "
65 Gothic Film "One crucial feature which connects many of these films is their dependence on Gothic literary sources; but there are other, more important aspects which justify defining them as a subgenre in their own right."
71 Gothic and the Graphic Novel
86 cites Clive Barker as a Gothic Writer
119 cites William Gibson as a Gothic Writer
264 "Conformity is central to one of the earliest Gothic monsters established in the twentieth century: the zombie."
278 "Male Gothic tends to represent the male protagonist's attempt to penetrate some encompassing interior; female Gothic more typically represents a female protagonist's attempts to escape from a confining interior. Elaborating upon this basic distinction, however, critics have posited various more detailed differences in terms of both plot patterns and narrative conventions."
280 "While it is generally accepted that the primary defining trait of female Gothic is the consistent focus on the heroine and the house, there has, nevertheless, been much crutical debate over the way this focus should be interpreted and the function it serves." goes on to explain theorists that see Female Gothic as subversive
288 in subsection on "The History of Abuse," states "Most obviously, of course, the tales that Gothic recounts have all too frequently to do with the violent abuse of women."
291 "If women are abused in the Gothic, then it is perhaps unsuprising to find that the fate of children, their powerlessness in the face of persecution, is another recurring Gothic theme."