‘The Graveyard Book’ is about a little boy who survives the murder of his family. The ghosts of the graveyard take the boy in and raise him. At this graveyard, the dead raise the living.
Realizing the Victorian Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
In an early scene from Mary Barton, Gaskell’s 1848 high-realist novel of class and crime, Mary’s father and a former coworker go to visit a sick worker from Carsons’ mill. Wending their way through the poverty and hopelessness of industrial Manchester, they finally reach his family home, located in a cellar “about one foot below the level of the street” (60).
Raygun Gothic Retrofuturism and Raypunk in Art Deco Context
In keeping with my previous research and developments in Retrofuturism, I have discovered a new genre, Raygun Gothic, and a subgenre, Raypunk. I am instantly enthralled by the mixture of vintage imagery with sci-fi, and as such, I really want to explore this further.
Die a Graphic Death: Revisiting the Death of Genre with Novels
In ‘The Death of Genre: Why the Best YA fiction Often Defies Classification’, Scot Smith speaks of having to constantly reclassify and reshuffle texts as he and his students consider the books on the genre lists used in his classes.
Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic
As a literary phenomenon, the Victorian gothic manifests itself in fin-de-siècle literature both as a subversive supernatural force and as a mechanism for social critique. Envisioning the world as a dark and spiritually turbulent tableau, the fictions of the late-Victorian gothic often depict the city of London as a corrupt urban landscape characterised by a brooding populace and by its horror-filled streets of terror.
Evolution of Gothicism in the British Novel and Visual Art
In Bram Stoker’s classic vampire tale, ‘Dracula’ (1897), the Count turns and threatens his pursuers, claiming “‘[m]y revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side’” (263). The myth of the vampire — and particularly Stoker’s contributions to the myth — serves as an effective metaphor for the very genre of Gothicism in which that myth frequently appears. Stoker’s Count Dracula can change into a bat, a wolf, a pack of rats, or even a cloud of mist.
“Monsters of the Imagination”: Gothic, and Dark Romance
Science fiction and Gothic? The conjunction of two hybrid genres composed from diverse literary and mythical precursors breeds monstrosities: strange beings and disturbing other — and underworlds lurk at the limits of modern knowledge. Despite so many Gothic science fiction mutations, it is strange the genres should cross at all.
